It doesn't matter, because as far as the gaming press themselves are concerned, they are the most righteous force on earth. They ignore covering most of the issues in which they or other journalists are culpable, they dismiss and openly antagonize and even hate their audience, and they walk around sniffing the asses of everyone they cover in hope for getting the hell out of the hallowed halls of journalism so they can go work in marketing, community management, PR, writing, design, or some other aspect at a developer or publisher.
There are a few exceptions out there which are fantastic (as far as we know), but we're clearly l talking about the gaming press as a whole, which requires generalized statements.
@Ghost_Cat said:
Every press or gaming press makes mistakes or gets a little carried away sometimes, but it's the fanbase, commenters, and forum users who are out-of-control embarrassing.
Which is annoying, but you presumably should expect more form someone who likely has a degree and considers themselves a professional who is doing this professionally. I expect far more from a guy writing for Forbes or Game Informer than I do from Ghost_Cat or someone else posting spur of the moment comments in the Giant Bomb forums. Well, I don't actually expect more -- because experience has taught me otherwise. But one should reasonably expect more.
@Pr1mus said:
The gaming press can be pretty bad at times but other than the ME3 thing your other examples are even worst. You just sound like a crazy person going nuts over review scores.
I think a better example that could have been used is the narrow-minded dog-with-a-bone "sexism sexism gamers are evil scum!" stuff that went on all year. In some cases, in reasonable response to actual incidents out there and in far more cases as a dragged-on link-bait or self-wanking attempt to seem more serious than most of their content would otherwise be. This in contrast to the lack of other "serious coverage" of just about any other topics. An example of contrast, the original poster could have brought up how so many of the biggest outlets just completely ignored the whole Lauren Wainwright and Rob Florence thing and the ones who did finally cover it only doing so with great disdain for having to do so and only in response to an overwhelming outcry from their own readers (and when they finally did bother to cover it even a little bit well after the fact, it mostly focused on how anyone who judged Wainwrights abhorrent behavior was a "misogynist" -- because that goes back to the only serious thing gamer journalists know how to write about, I guess).
In fact, this goes back to the sentiment some are showing in this thread, about "the internet" instead of the journalists. I think a great deal of the shit we see from "the internet" is due to the total lack of setting a high bar by game journalists.
In the end, too many of us then just dismiss any journalist failures by saying that they aren't real journalists or it doesn't count because it's just entertainment or because this is an area which mixes being an enthusiast with being a journalist and reviewer. Those are all pretty cheap and flimsy excuses. It's true that this is the current state of affairs, but it isn't true that it's all we should expect and absolutely not true that it's all we should demand.
For that matter, we should begin to demand more from each other, as an audience/community/commentors, too.
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