Why it is difficult as an outsider to see what is really going on
My personal impression of the whole debacle as an outsider (Until a few weeks ago I wasn't following events of any kind on twitter, tumblr, 4chan and similar sites, yes I'm new to writing on reddit as well):
- 2-3 months ago I read something about some questionable people doing somewhat unethical things. I didn't care enough to look any further.
- about a month ago I read something about GamerGate and harassment, I checked wikipedia: "a bunch of sexist harassment against some developers" and whatnot. I didn't really care; harassment on the internet is nothing new, but I believed WP [for the last time regarding something political].
- 2-3 weeks ago I accidentally came across something portraying the situation in a completely different way and after some digging I was shocked.
I still don't understand everything, but it seems the biggest problem "your side" has is getting heard. You lost the PR war (you had no chance). WP article is crap. Most media outlets write crap (no wonder, since you oppose practices of certain journalists).
But one thing I always see is that the other side claims you are harassers and ridicule your answer "it's actually about ethics in video game journalism". And you don't seem to do anything about it even when you have the chance (at least this is what it looks like).
From WP talk page:
At the absolute best there are two camps of gamergaters: the 'but ethics!' crowd (who by most accounts spend a lot of time talking about how they're about ethics and not much actually talking about it) and the ones doing the harassing. (And you can spare me the 'they don't represent gamergate' because we all know what the sources say.) We can't give 'but ethics' pride of place when they're the minority perspective. They're getting the extreme minority of mainstream press coverage, and that's because their actions are less interesting, less notable and less significant - because their ethics campaign, again, appears to be largely limited to saying 'gamergate is about ethics.' We can not claim that there is one coherent position that is the gamergate position. We have people saying gamergate is against harassment, and then we have gamergate's extremely well-documented harassment. So at the worst, this article is 'biased' against one faction of gamergate by not presenting it as the majority view at the expense of the much larger, more active and better referenced 'side' that's vocally attacking too-vocal women, "SJWs" and other undesirables in the gaming community.
This is makes it quite clear how you are seen from the other side (assuming they don't want to see only the harassment), especially:
[...] spend a lot of time talking about how they're about ethics and not much actually talking about it [...]
Writing to advertisers is one thing, but when some of you had the chance to talk in interviews why were there no mentions of concrete instances of unethical behaviour of journalists (or too little). I have seen the interviews by David Pakman (really great interviews) and I always asked myself why has nobody brought up concrete charges against specific journalists; you seem to have quite a collection here in your wiki. But why didn't TB and the others (sorry, I'm bad with names) mention more or any of these cases? There is at most only the mentioning of the existence of unethical behaviour in general, possibly hints in the right direction and really not much of concrete demands (I remember someone wants those journalists to apologize and publish ethical guidelines, it nothing concrete enough).
But has anyone tried to get Pakman to interview some of these bad journalists?
This might just be an incorrect impression of an outsider and some of you may have already tried that, but I would advise: Have your facts handy and list names and charges given the chance and ignore the crazy noise about anything you don't identify with. Give neutral journalists compiled lists of facts that they can investigate further.
Please don't give up before results of official investigations are published.
Disclaimer: I'm a privileged gamer.
Posted Nov 10, 2014, 2:19 PM UTC
OP, you are dead on we can't win the PR war by sheer force. So we have to hold out long term. The longer we are here making noise, the more people like you come in and read what we are posting.
GamerGate has accepted that this is long term. We'll be here in 2015, and 2016, working towards ethics and bias free journalism. They will be slandering us until 2020, minimum.
And the best part, is we are having fun. We aren't like the republicans who have to be serious all the time. This is actually fun for us, so while they are screaming GG MUST END RIGHT NOW! The Cost is toooo high! BAD BAD BAD!" We are sitting back with popcorn making new memes.
WE have truth, we have justice, we have humor. WE won't win overnight, but long term we are unstoppable.
Some parts of this situation are definitely fun.
But there are lots of things that are extremely frustrating. This is the reason I won't get involved much. I wrote the newspaper I read the most to consider writing something about the ethics problems, gave them even links, but no luck so far.
Oh good luck with that. On the off chance the story does run, they will receive massive backlash. Why? Because it involves what we're actually concerned with so it will appear the paper is "siding" with us by addressing it.
Somehow they feel like we're a hate campaign who doesn't care about ethics, yet cockblocks US tryin to work on that front. Because it would legitimize our hate campaign. The sheer lack of logic astounds me. Then they'll bully the paper until they retract it to ensure we don't make any progress on our goals.
That's good. We need those. Because that way the "good guys" come off as completely unhinged. They are actually giving us pretty good PR every time they flip their shit.
Thanks for doing what you can, and for trying to contact your local media. Most of our action has been consumer action, because the media does not report well on itself. Our communication and PR efforts do exist, but they use a peer-to-peer model/approach, rather than a top down (authoritarian) model. That is largely due to the fact that we arrived here -- like yourself -- because of our own investigation and hard work, so we believe that other people will do the same.
As the OP of this thread stated, this will take time though. You'll find this community very welcoming and respectful of new people, because we assume that given enough time they can form their own opinions. And their conclusions may not be totally in line with the general consensus (whatever that is), but that's fine.
That's why you take time off from time to time and play a game or two, then write a few more emails / letters and maybe help make another music video.
We have morals, we have ethics, we have a bunch of awesome people here, and the ability to mock ourselves when it's needed. We've got drama that we don't really care about in the end because we have no leaders. We have logic.
Also, we've made a lot of new friends/acquaintances :)