Jason Mojica


Jason Mojica is an American journalist, film producer, and musician. He was the founding editor-in-chief of VICE News, and in 2013 became one of the first Americans to meet Kim Jong Un when he led the team that brought Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters to North Korea.

Early life and education

Jason Mojica was born in Cicero, Illinois in 1974. He attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale for one year before dropping out, although he later earned a degree, at age 34, in Political Communication from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.. After beginning attendance at the school, however, Mojica said he never felt like part of the university community: "I'm a 31-year-old male. Do you really want me living in a dorm?" Mojica said in offering an "awkward explanation" he gave to live off-campus.
Mojica had originally dropped out of college to become the front man of The Fighters, a punk rock band he started with high school friends. Mojica also began his own indie record label, Rocco Records, opened his own coffee house, and bought a video rental store. The decision to return to college, he explained, was an "attempt to think inside the box and learn how to write a business letter."

Career

In 2006, Mojica and two friends crowdfunded, produced and directed the documentary Christmas in Darfur? It was one of the first feature-length documentaries to be distributed online for free.
Mojica moved to London in 2009, and became a producer and correspondent on The Listening Post, a weekly media review and analysis program airing on Al Jazeera English.
Mojica joined VICE Media in 2011, and contributed segments for "The Vice Guide to Everything" which Mojica described as "60 Minutes meets Jackass... Hard hitting international news meets damaged genitals." He later produced "tentpole" documentaries for the web, including two Webby Award-winning films: The Vice Guide to Congo, and The Rebels of Libya. In 2012 he became a producer on the debut season of the company's eponymous HBO show, VICE.

"Basketball diplomacy" in North Korea

In March 2013 Mojica became one of the first Americans to meet the reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Mojica and Vice Media founder Shane Smith are said to have come up with the idea of gaining access to film in North Korea by appealing to Kim Jong Un's reported love of basketball by proposing "a goodwill game of basketball with North Korea's national team." The Vice crew brought with them 5-time NBA Champion Dennis Rodman, and three members of the Harlem Globetrotters. New York Times media critic David Carr wrote at the time: "Vice gained a share of infamy by getting access to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the notoriously secretive country he leads through a caper involving Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters, a stunt that drew attention, invective and clicks."
The New Yorker later commented that the "cheerful scene—billed as 'basketball diplomacy'—was soon complicated by developments in U.S.-North Korean relations. After Rodman's visit, North Korea... scrapped its 1953 armistice with South Korea and threatened a preëmptive nuclear attack on the United States... What had seemed like a bold P.R. stunt by Vice now looked like cozying up to a dangerous dictator. This was not helped by a report from Ryan Duffy, a Vice correspondent, on Kim Jong-un's hospitality" by hosting an "epic feast" for him, Mojica, and Smith. On top of that, Rodman stood up at the banquet and told Kim: “Sir, you have a friend for life.” Vice followed by posting accounts of their trip on its website entitled "North Korea Has a Friend in Dennis Rodman and VICE."After learning of Duffy's comments, and Rodman's praise of the regime, Dan Rather said on CNN: "I’ve never seen anything quite like this. More ‘Jackass’ Than Journalism.'" In the context of "recent reports of cannibalism among a starving population", The New Yorker opined, Rather further said, "Those remarks and current headline on the Vice Web site that ‘North Korea has a friend in Dennis Rodman and Vice’ seem a bit, well, tasteless.” Mojica has countered that such criticism was "sanctimonious."
While in Pyongyang, Mojica and the other members of the Vice crew attended the lavish dinner hosted by Kim. "It was the most surreal experience of my life," Mojica said. "Um... so Kim Jong Un just got the #VICEonHBO crew wasted... no really, that happened," Mojica later tweeted. Duffy told the Associated Press: "Dinner was an epic feast. Felt like about 10 courses in total. I'd say the winners were the smoked turkey and sushi, though we had the Pyongyang cold noodles earlier in the trip and that's been the runaway favorite so far." Mojica, Duffy and the others were criticized on social media and on news sites for their Tweets and comments praising the celebration, in lieu of the fact that millions of North Koreans have died of starvation. The website Gawker intermingled Mojica's tweets with images of starving infants and children on the verge of death. New York magazine commented: "Aside from the brutal slave-labor camps, the routine rape and torture of political prisoners, mass starvation extreme enough to induce episodes of cannibalism... North Korea sounds like a blast!" Shane Smith complained that a State Department official reprimanded him, saying: "We would have hoped they would have taken the food from the banquet and given it to the starving people." The New York Times has reported that as many as two million North Koreans have died of starvation.
The trip was severely criticized by the Obama administration, leading White House press secretary Jay Carney saying that, "Instead of spending money on celebrity sporting events to entertain the elites of that country, the North Korean regime should focus on the well-being of its own people who have been starved, imprisoned, and denied their human rights." A State Department spokesperson said: "Clearly you've got the regime spending money to wine and dine foreign visitors, when they should be feeding their own people."

Launch of VICE News

After the first season of the Vice show on HBO, Mojica became the founding Editor-in-Chief and Executive Producer of the company's stand-alone digital news platform, Vice News. The site launched in March 2014 with coverage of the conflict and unrest in Afghanistan Crimea, Gaza, Kyrgyzstan, South Sudan, and Venezuela. One media critic noted that "the trailer for the forthcoming news channel gives a clear look at what Vice is interested in: unrest, conflict, revolution, persecution."
In August 2014, Vice News became the first news organization to embed with the Islamic State. The resulting documentary, The Islamic State, received worldwide news coverage, has been viewed more than 13 million times online, and won a 2014 Peabody Award and a National Magazine Award.
Such work led the New York Times then-media critic David Carr, who had sparred with Vice founder Shane Smith, to reconsider his previously harsh views of the media company: "Being the crusty old-media scold felt good at the time, but recent events suggest that Vice is deadly serious about doing real news that people, yes, even young people, will actually watch." Carr wrote of the ISIS documentary in particular, "The ISIS story scans as both propaganda and remarkable journalism, some of it filmed in Syria, the most dangerous place in the world to be a reporter right now." More broadly, Carr wrote, he was "glad that someone's willing to do the important work of bearing witness, the kind that can get you killed if something goes wrong."
Others were more critical, with some suggesting that in making a film about the Islamic State, Vice had colluded with a terrorist organization. At a panel discussion at NYU, Mojica said, "I can certainly say that there is no collusion between Vice News and the Islamic State as much as there is a bit of sparring and each of us probably trying to get something different out of ... ut that was a very unique case and it comes with, of course, conditions in order to get in and get out with your life. You understand you're operating under a very peculiar set of rules." Notably, "Mojica declined to elaborate when asked what 'conditions,' specifically, were agreed upon with the militants," according to a report in The Huffington Post. Kevin Sutcliffe, who headed Vice's programming in Europe, told The Huffington Post that its filmmakers "hadn't been able to travel freely during his reporting trip inside Syria and always accompanied by a minder from the Islamic State."
During Mojica's tenure as a founding editor and the executive producer of Vice News, the The Washington Post reported, the company regularly "blurred the lines between reporting and advertising. It has removed or altered some of its work after advertisers complained that the material put them in an unflattering light. On at least two occasions, it wove documentary footage into promotions for advertisers." The Post reported that in one instance, "Vice showed particular deference toward its sponsors in a three-part series about a year ago on the Ku Klux Klan's recruitment of military veterans. The series initially appeared online with the logos of several companies visible onscreen. In one shot, for example, a bystander wears a T-shirt featuring the Nike logo; in another, a self-identified Klansman wears a cap with a Budweiser logo and drinks a Bud Lite. "The appearance of the logos set off a brief flurry among the documentary's producers, who scrambled to obscure them from viewers after the documentary had already been posted. The series was briefly taken down and the logos of the two companies — both of which have been Vice sponsors — were digitally blurred, as was the logo on a Coke can. The series then reappeared, with the images altered."

Firing for sexual harassment

In November 2017, Vice Media formally suspended Mojica pending an investigation of allegations into sexual harassment made against him by several past and current employees. The following month, Mojica was terminated after an internal company investigation. The company said in a memo sent to employees: "Vice Media fired three employees for behavior ranging from verbal and sexual harassment to other behavior that is inconsistent with our policies, our values, and the way in which we believe colleagues should work together."
That internal corporate investigation was prompted by investigative stories in The New York Times and The Daily Beast examining allegations of sexual harassment regarding several senior male executives in the company. Several women accused Mojica of such misconduct. The Times' expose reported, for example, that "Abby Ellis, a former Vice journalist, said that in 2013 Mr. Mojica... tried to kiss her against her will. She said that she yelled at him and hit him with an umbrella multiple times. She said that she faced other unwanted advances from Mr. Mojica after the incident. Ms. Ellis said that after the episode she felt that their relationship soured and that she was missing out on newsroom opportunities."
Mojica responded by saying that he had been "misreading a moment" by "foolishly trying to kiss Abby." A second woman employed by Vice, Helen Donahue, alleged that Mojica had "grabbed her breasts and buttocks at a company holiday party", the Times reported. Mojica said that he did not "remember doing anything of the sort."
The Times also reported that Vice settled a potential lawsuit "for an unknown amount" of money with Martina Veltroni, a former employee, who alleged that while he was her supervisor, Mojica "retaliated against her after they had a sexual relationship" when Veltroni sought to end it.
Several other women came forward to allege that Mojica, as their supervisor, dismissed their claims of sexual harassment by other men in the company, and were told they had to tolerate such behavior to keep their own jobs. A former Vice associate producer, Phoebe Barghouty, told The Daily Beast, that after she complained to Mojica about incidents of sexual harassment by other men in the company directed against her, Mojica told her: "The thing about working in this industry, is that we have people going into war zones and the only people willing to do that are sociopaths. And you just have to deal with that because that's the only kind of person who can get that story." Mojica responded by making the claim that Barghouty's recollection was incorrect and inconsistent with his attitudes. Paraphrasing Mojica's response to these allegations, Mojica told The Daily Beast, that "Barghouty's recollection was incorrect and inconsistent with his attitudes."

Filmography

2018: Shelter
2017:
2017: A World in Disarray
2014: The Islamic State
2014: Last Chance High
2013: The Hermit Kingdom
2012: Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan
2011: North Korean Labor Camps
2011: The VICE Guide to Congo
2008: Christmas in Darfur?

Awards and nominations

2016: Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards - Selfie Soldiers
2016: National Magazine Award - Selfie Soldiers
2015: National Magazine Award - The Islamic State
2015; News & Documentary Emmy Award - Russian Roulette, The Invasion of Ukraine
2015; News & Documentary Emmy Award - Outstanding Interview, "The Architect"
2014: Peabody Award - Last Chance High
2014: Peabody Award - The Islamic State