I’d Like Some Ethics With That Please

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I should be writing.

I say that to myself whenever that inevitable moment of writer’s block starts to set in. For me, it’s that little attempt to get something started in my head before I end up staring blankly at the screen for almost an hour, or even days, with no way to start digging that kernel of an idea out of my head and onto the page. Sometimes it’s enough. Sometimes I can find inspiration from taking a moment to gather and focus my thoughts and go to work with the same fervor and fire I did when I first started doing this almost nine years ago.

Sometimes it’s not.

Because I’m starting to realize that journalism, and not just games journalism, is becoming a caricature of what it once represented; that drive towards unblemished truth and the realization that a journalist is a civil servant and not some grandstanding celebrity, not some yellow-seeking sensationalist. That’s something I’m noticing more and more from the so-called mainstream media. It’s something that struck a nerve with me a few weeks ago. I’ve talked about it a little before but I think it bears repeating; about the time I walked into a convenience store and noticed all these rag mags on the newsstand taking up prominent eye space where there used to be the old standbys. Time, The New Yorker, Forbes.

They’d all been pushed back behind these trash tabloids like Closer, OK! Magazine, Hush-Hush, and the National Enquirer. These fast food, sensationalistic rumor-churning wastes of paper spread out across the racks. Dozens of them. Using print font 3 inches tall, their covers clogged with shlock. Shlock headlines, shlock pictures, shlock writing. DRUNK! PREGNANT! DIVORCED! KARDASHIAN! SHOCK! Rumor-churning, stomach-churning trash. Sprawled out in all their bloated glory in the once decent spaces where more prominent and more important magazines should be. Hoping that the wonton passerby will cram down their empty, truth-devoided drivel just to feed a curiosity that’s more harmful than good. These rotting-the-brain-from-the-inside-out “articles” more rumor, opinion and second-hand hearsay than truth.

The real crime though, is that this kind of journalism is starting to permeate across the internet. It’s starting to clog the superhighway with trash; mocking, in a way, the decent gains honest and hardworking journalists the world over are trying to make. It’s starting to rot the internet with empty caloric, vein-rupturing tripe written by hack-spewing writers. These people and fellows who fashion themselves professional journalists who have not even an ounce of talent or training. Spreading “thur feelz” like some cancer of ineptitude. Idiot sensationalists who trump the idea of truth in favor of simply believing the unverified, agenda-driven propaganda because it’s either being espoused by some specific person of import or some empty-headed (mostly dull witted) e-celebrity simply because it adds a few more desperate clicks to their already disparate click-baited drivel.

And that’s bullshit.

“A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts.” ~ Glenn Greenwald

Because the first rule of journalism, true and honest journalism, is simple: trust but verify. You don’t just take someone’s word for it without basic fact checking. No matter who it is or what they say, always verify it. Because when you don’t, well, you end up like the Rolling Stone after their bogus UVa rape story got torn to shreds. You end up like Fareed Zakaria trying to weasel himself out of multiple plagiarism allegations. You end up like Brian Williams having to explain why he lied about… well… a LOT of bullshit from his past. You end up like ABC trying to justify a GamerGate hit-piece on their Nightly News segment failing to even maintain a sense of either adequate research, or even objectivity. These are the people and institutions that the so called anti-gamer Social Justice Warrior looks up to (and even emulates with their GameJournoPros list), expecting with a certain level of smugness for them to carry that narrative unquestionably to a wider audience.

These once-impressionable people have lost sight of what made journalism great. They’ve allowed themselves to be tainted by the greediest, most negative aspects of this profession. Pride. Is it wrong to be proud of your work? Of course not. But when you let it dictate your actions, when you let it insulate you against genuine discourse and opinion, then you let it control you. You let it lead you down a questionably immoral path. A path that sheds you of certain obligations not only to the people, but to yourself. An obligation to be as objective and as unbiased as you can be in reporting.

And I hate to break it to these special snowflake dingle-berries, but the mainstream media has their own problems to contend with. Not only are they putting on display almost on a daily basis just how woefully inept they are at their own jobs, they’re exceptionally unfit to take on this “gamers are misogynists” rhetoric that’s been falling apart faster than you can say “Anita Sarkeesian is a con-woman.” This is one of the reasons, in my nine years of writing online, that I’ve never written professionally. My expertise is Narrative Journalism; I like working at my own pace, for people who don’t try to push an agenda into everything I write. Every story has a story, and I like to utilize that to the best of my ability. I don’t really care how big or small the audience is. I don’t.

“Pride, envy, avarice – these are the sparks that have set on fire the souls of many men.” ~ Dante Alighieri

Have I thought about doing it, going professional you might ask? Yes. I’d be lying to you all if I said I haven’t. Millions of people reading what I write, that’d be something positive, I think. But when I look out and see scandals like Gerstmann-Gate, Dorito-Gate, and yes, even Gamer-Gate, plaguing the larger games media outlets, then I realize that I dodged a bullet in more was than one by keeping to my ideas of humility, respect for my audience, and a need to be as factual as humanly possible. If the trade-off for me for reaching millions of people was to give up everything that made me as a writer both respectable and objective, then it’d be too high a price to pay. Sadly, some people don’t think that way. People like Leigh Alexander and Ben Kuchera don’t care about being objective, or even good, at their job. They just see clicks. And how those clicks can make as much money for them as possible. They don’t see people, they see potential profit in their pockets. Sensationalistic junk peddlers, the both of them. People like that need to do the right thing before it’s too late; get the hell out before the boat they’re on sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic.

I just look at all this yellow, chaff-filled journalistic nonsense being regurgitated across all of these rag mags and rag internet sites, these rumor-churning sensationalistic piles of literary garbage, and I only see something that wastes time, paper, digital code, money and all of our patience when their are hundreds, if not thousands, of more deserving places and institutions out there that should be front and center. I see these sites and the muckraking, bottom-feeding profligates that run and write for them and I weep. I physically weep at the joke that journalism has become as a whole in this country because of these sycophants. And yet, at the same time, I also don’t care.

I don’t care about the size of Kim Kardashian’s ass. I don’t care about Miley Cyrus’ drunken rants (yet again) being written in print font the size of a baby’s head; these headlines screaming, begging the reader to consume that poisoned ink. And mostly, I don’t care about your feelings. Being emotional about your work is fine, but when it colors and blurs the truth to the point that it becomes some inedible piece of bullshit because you want to twist the narrative to include your own personal feelings or your own personal agendas, then I don’t want it.

Fuck. Your. Feelings. Fuck. Your. Agendas. Either learn to properly do your jobs as journalists, or get the hell out of the way for more experienced and better prepared people. The day that happens is when journalism as a whole can get back on track. Because I’m tired of this fast food bullshit from fast food consuming “journalists” being forced down my throat.

I want to read about a fucking steak. Gaming or otherwise.