‘Vice,’ a New Approach to News, on HBO

“This is the world through our eyes,” we’re told at the top of “Vice,” the new HBO program produced by the Brooklyn-based Vice Media, a successful purveyor of video, music and clothing that’s really in the business of selling an attitude. The eyes of Vice are male, between late youth and early middle age and self-consciously gonzo in a dilettantish, 21st-century manner that would make Hunter S. Thompson spit up his Chivas. You can picture him doing it during the series’s introduction, as a voice-over states that “Vice” will “expose the absurdity of the modern condition.”

“Vice,” which begins on Friday night, is a newsmagazine, with initial segments on political violence in the Philippines and child suicide bombers in Afghanistan; next week it’s North Korean escapees and tensions in Kashmir. (The already notorious Dennis Rodman visit to North Korea will come up later in the season.) The reports reflect a stated goal of traveling to danger zones, but as with every television magazine, you can see the visceral or prurient appeal of each report: guns, piles of dead bodies, goose-stepping soldiers, desperate refugees forced into prostitution.

You know that “Vice” will be sensationalistic, and there is plenty of hazily sourced video of violence and death. But body parts really are blown off in Afghanistan, a fact that’s harder to forget after you’ve seen a severed head lying in a road. And anything that contributes to the sum total of Americans’ exposure to other places and people is a good thing.

The problem with “Vice” isn’t its insistent aggrandizement but its excessive softheadedness. It’s journalism at the intersection of shallow and gullible, where they meet, high-five and compare tattoos. We get ride-alongs and interviews, though precious little information. The report from the Philippines contains one unsourced statistic about political killings but no discussion of the effects of poverty or the legacy of American colonization.

In the Afghanistan report much is made of an interview obtained through “back-room negotiations and scary situations,” but the subject, Syed Muhammad Akbar Agha, is a prominent Taliban spokesman who lives openly in Kabul and is frequently interviewed by Western reporters. He appears to be stifling a laugh when Shane Smith, the Vice chief executive and correspondent, asks him, “What is the Taliban’s position on suicide attacks?”

The line on Vice Media is that it’s a cross of MTV and Maxim for the digital age, with a knack for capturing the attention of restless young men. “Vice,” with its mix of naïveté, superficiality and occasionally tearful empathy, doesn’t feel particularly young, but in the way it sees the rest of the world, it does feel prototypically American.

Vice

HBO, Friday nights at 11, Eastern and Pacific times; 10, Central time.

Bill Maher, Shane Smith and Eddy Moretti, executive producers; B J Levin, co-executive producer; Fareed Zakaria, consulting producer; Mr. Smith, host; Ryan Duffy and Thomas Morton, correspondents.