This post is simply part 1.
The reason for breaking it up has to do with a suggestion I heard on NPR yesterday; during an interview segment, a caller suggested that the issue should be broken into two pieces:
- A discussion of media ethics
- A discussion of misogyny in gamer culture
As I say, try to reserve judgment.
For those unfamiliar, the extremely-reduced version of events is basically this: A woman who designed a video game was reportedly dating a writer at an online game journal, and the attacks initially stated that her game would not have received the kind of hype it did had it not been for journalistic bias toward it by that journal. Some of those attacks focused on her as a woman, and some the defenses posted by various different people assumed that folks were attacking her because she is a woman, or that people were attacking "female game design." One female writer posted on a completely different site about the misogyny inherent in such attacks, and suddenly Intel pulled its advertising from that site.
To go into it any further is to muddy the water. That's not fair to muddy water - it's rather like watering the mud.
Since then, the gamer world has lost. its. shit. To the extent that women who've simply commented on the scandal have received death and rape threats.
This post is not about the misogyny element, whether it exists or not, etc. And believe me, it's taking a lot of restraint not to comment on that piece yet. That's the next post.
This first post is about media ethics.
Now, I can't speak for what actually occurs in the games industry, but I do know what I've experienced writing music reviews for a local music magazine. There's a feeling that true criticism of musicians and venues is not only unwarranted, but also dangerous. The venues pay our bills by posting advertisements in our paper. Events give us free entry into the event in exchange for covering it.
To talk badly about these things is to bite the hand that feeds you.
I'm not talking about editorial censorship - rather, I'm talking about my own self-censorship. When I write about an event, I feel like I have to pull my punches, because I know that that's what is expected. The result is that our articles have no teeth; rather than salacious, they're fellatious.
Here's the thing, though: this is nothing new. I'm glad gamers are finally waking up to a fact that has been around as long as media has been around, but this property of news is literally that old. Noam Chomsky went into great detail about what it is and why it happens way back in 1988 (in Manufacturing Consent, which I would quote from if I could find it in the boxes of books I haven't shelved yet after my last move).
I do remember that Chomsky notes that there is a respect among journalists for their sources, such that they'll often simply publish directly whatever they're asked to (press releases from companies and government offices, for instance) rather than digging into the story. It has to do with the need to continue having access to such information.
Or, as Stephen Colbert put it in his White House Correspondents Dinner address:
Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's "The Decider." The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know: fiction!I don't say these things to say they're not valid, but rather to say that they are! Our media is and always has been unethical, and it seems to be a necessary trait of media. As long as media is at the mercy of advertisers, it is always having to juggle that balance between ethical reporting and survival. Only advertising-free journalism is safe, and even then that journalism has to negotiate the boundary between access and story, between what is expected of them culturally and what is desired of them. We rue the loss of reporters like Woodward and Bernstein, but the fact is that there have never been such reporters - they are a part of our American mythos, a belief that times were better "back in the day." Reporters have always only been able to turn against administrations and corporations when the tide of public opinion was already turning that direction, giving them the safety of popularity.
So, what's the answer? If I knew the answer entirely, I'd be rich - it has plagued mankind as long as newspapers have been a thing.
However, I think that to an extent the Internet is already an answer - that is, if a game reviewer reviews a game positively, and that game turns out to be shit, then the tide of public opinion will swing very rapidly against it and it will be obvious to a great many people that the review is crap. If bloggers take advantage of that situation to point out when reviewers are wrong, to compare the scores various reviewers give to games to the scores that those games eventually get from the general public, perhaps we can come up with some standards for reading reviews, and call out especially bad reviewers.
I think the answer is also that if we want well-done reviews, we need to be willing to shell out the cash for them. A subscription-based game news outlet would be free to review whatever it wants however it wants without risk of advertiser reprisal. If gamers truly want journalistic integrity, they need to put their money where their mouths are.
The answer is certainly not, however, sending threats to the authors... (continued hopefully tomorrow)
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