The above series of events is the only thing I care about in this whole mess and the people defending that behaviour is the very reason games journalism is not respected as real journalism.
No one I've noticed is actually defending the behavior. Everything I've seen so far is simple incredulity at the fact that people believe an incredibly minor scandal that isn't even a meaningful drop in the corruption bucket is something other than it is. Frankly, journalism itself, period, world over, has largely lost all tracery of "real" journalism, which has been functionally dead on the large scale of things for
decades.
I'd be worried about turning tricks for good PR if I thought it was actually happening enough to meaningfully impact
anything. Which I don't. If you're looking for the actual source of corruption in gaming media, you've got all those wonderful
bribes -- from money, to free games, to special access to certain events, and so on -- that are outright industry standard.
S'considerably more strange that so few seem to say anything about youtube reviewers getting free and early access from game devs, gaming media in general having free and early access, the overt bribe that is media access to stuff like PAX or whatever's in vogue these days, and so on. Blatant, bald face bribes directly to reviewers -- self-styled journalists effectively getting outright
paid, by the developers, to make reviews for games -- and pretty much no one says a single solitary thing about the outright ethical fuckup that is.
That, more than anything, is why gaming media isn't "real" journalism. It's been a joke since the first time a magazine said "yes" when a company offered a free copy for review, however many decades ago that was.
Just imagine a reporter at cnn having sex with the boss of some start up company and then proceeding to write fluff pieces for that company, the backlash against cnn would be immense but here for some reason the opposite is true. It doesn't even matter if the product is bloody amazing, the journalistic piece will still be tainted and should have been written by another person.
No... I'm pretty sure no one's actually given a damn about print/TV media screwing clients and then writing good bits about them, which has no doubt happened plenty of times over the years. Honestly, I've yet to see a scandal of
any sort meaningfully impact a major news venue. Think the worst dustup I can recall was that bit with phone tapping, which barely did anything of note. Modern news in general has become corrupt to the point most folks with sense ignore everything that comes out of it, for good reason, and whatever kerfluffles that do pop up regarding integrity blow over in days.
