"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[syntheticgerbil]

I'm only about a half hour in, but Total Biscuit invited Stephen Totilo onto his show to talk about ethics (lol) and Totilo frankly makes him sound like a dumbass - 

 

 

Notable Points -

• TB asks if a public apology is warranted for Patricia Hernandez's disclosure faux pas, to which Totilo says that having corrections issued to your article is shameful enough and he feels that demanding a public apology of her is simply a means of wringing more shame out of her. TB says that he thinks apologies are just a sign of good faith, which is pretty silly in context.
• TB goes into somewhat exhaustive detail about some of the "worst" points of the GameJournosPro thing and almost every incident he mentions leads Stephen Totilo to basically ask - this is a candid email discussion, the reporters were often crafting their stories as they got input from others in the press, so why would we hold them to the highest standards of journalistic integrity when this kind of interaction doesn't dictate their final decisions? Does an EIC saying "don't give this journalist any work" necessarily mean that every other EIC will follow in lockstep? At this point in the interview, Totilo seems a bit exasperated because every one of TB's questions seems to be assuming the absolute worst from everyone involved while Totilo feels that a vast majority of reporters are simply acting in good faith and make mistakes like any person.

Wait wait wait. I'm about 17 minutes in. Why is this Game Jam article such an issue? It's not a review and it was accurate. I thought GamerGate people were always mad about the later mention of Depression Quest which was not in a review, not the Game Jam article which has nothing to do with promoting any game. Either way unless you feel angry that Makar/Polaris/Disney was smeared, which TotalBiscuit obviously needs to, as even though he wasn't at the Game Jam, those are his bosses. Why does he not disclose that these are his bosses? If I cared about conspiracy theories, I would say it's not a leap that maybe TotalBiscuit is being paid extra to skew against the perception of Polaris/Makar/Disney that that article created.

The only thing that annoyed me about that article is it ended with many people going to Disneyland. Oh, I wonder why?!

 

Also if we go by a quote from Zoe on Eron's post, Zoe cheated on Eron with Robin Arnott one night of the Game Jam, not Nathan Grayson. The Nathan Grayson connection is later, even though Steven Totilo admits there may be some kind of murkiness there's really not. If the quotes from Zoe on Eron's post are indeed legit, then she was not sleeping with Nathan yet, unless we are to assume she was juggling many guys at once. But that's an assumption not based on anything either from the Eron, Zoe, or Stephen Totilo side just misogyny. Does it not obviously read as this is a reporting that probably later led to a relationship with Nathan and Zoe and not any time before? There's no evidence of anything but this.

Oh wait... it's Gamer Gate.

[Gormongous]

Wait wait wait. I'm about 17 minutes in. Why is this Game Jam article such an issue? It's not a review and it was accurate. I thought GamerGate people were always mad about the later mention of Depression Quest which was not in a review, not the Game Jam article which has nothing to do with promoting any game. Either way unless you feel angry that Makar/Polaris/Disney was smeared, which TotalBiscuit obviously needs to, as even though he wasn't at the Game Jam, those are his bosses. Why does he not disclose that these are his bosses? If I cared about conspiracy theories, I would say it's not a leap that maybe TotalBiscuit is being paid extra to skew against the perception of Polaris/Makar/Disney that that article created.

The only thing that annoyed me about that article is it ended with many people going to Disneyland. Oh, I wonder why?!

 

Yeah, there's this weird insistence with even the most "reasonable" people from #GamerGate that any allegation of misconduct is evidence of systemic corruption, with regards to the supposedly guilty party if not the entire profession as a whole. I don't know how Totilo can go toe to toe with TB for ninety minutes when every one of the latter's questions assumes that there is wrongdoing somewhere and it must be found. I try not to be petty, but I'd be making reference to chemtrails and grassy knolls after only half that amount of time, if not just turning the tables on TB like you suggest.

[JonCole]

I honestly can't even keep up with all that shit, I'm more interested in hearing TB insist on something unreasonable, Totilo offer some other perspective, TB restate himself slightly differently, and then Totilo basically say they're at an impasse and should move on. I get a distinct feel that TB is just out to "win" while Stephen is more interested in showing that there is/can be nuance to some of these issues/"issues".

[Flynn]

Yeah the Game_Jam article quotes a few sentences from Zoe Quinn and as far as I know nobody including Total Biscuit has any dispute with the facts as presented.  Yet Total Biscuit harps on this issue. Maybe he was friends with Zoe when he took down that quote, how can we know for sure?  These are the important matters GamerGate wants to iron out to make games journalism ethical.  It's bizarre.  Does he really have just no sense of perspective or is he just that much a jerk?

 

On a lighter note, Jonathan Mann sings his GamerGate comments: 

[syntheticgerbil]

I honestly can't even keep up with all that shit, I'm more interested in hearing TB insist on something unreasonable, Totilo offer some other perspective, TB restate himself slightly differently, and then Totilo basically say they're at an impasse and should move on. I get a distinct feel that TB is just out to "win" while Stephen is more interested in showing that there is/can be nuance to some of these issues/"issues".

I'm at 50 minutes, I don't know if I can finish. Definitely Totilo is noting but reasonable and balanced here, but it's like Total Biscuit has no clue of what ethics in journalism actually is STILL. There's parts where Stephen Totilo is explaining to him the ethics of some of his decisions and then TB will just respond with some kind of weird "gotcha" thing. Like him thinking Patricia Hernandez needs to apologize. Like he doesn't even concede that it is sort of humiliating enough to have your article edited months later with a disclaimer of disclosure. If you had an apology article just for that, it would be useless and then it would just create more gossip journalism.

 

Then he gets mad that other sites reported on and linked to Leigh Alexander's article. That's meaningless and besides Leigh Alexander wrote an opinion piece, and she's sort of a journalist celebrity that people want to read the opinions of, so it's sort of a big deal. Just as much when she wrote about Bioshock Infinite.

 

And then the article hurts the feelings of children on the autistic spectrum? That's such a stretch. Opinion pieces are not there to worry about not offending each and every person who may read it.

 

Gah I can't stand Total Biscuit. He's such a putz, which is a shame because he has a great radio voice, although that's probably the only reason he even got this far.

[Problem Machine]

I think he's coasted this far on the archetype of the dickish but smart, incisive, and funny British guy -- the problem being he's not actually that smart, incisive, or funny.

... basically he got there before Yahtzee did and put out more content.

[Denial]

Apparently, this was previously enough to convince a number of influential gamergaters that Nick Denton had raised an army of mercenaries:

 

 

It turned out that dogboner had not been totally on the level with them.

[Ben X]

Apparently GG is terribly excited today because KingofPol received PROOF! that Nick Denton of Gawker has been paying people to infiltrate Gamergate and sow dissent in the ranks. Furthermore, 8chan's Hotwheels says it checks out and is totally legit!

That evidence is:

This is remarkable.

 

Sorry for being super-dense, but can you please spell out for me why this is obviously not compelling evidence? I can guess at the usual suspects (fake, satire etc) but nothing's jumping out at me.

[sclpls]

Apparently, this was previously enough to convince a number of influential gamergaters that Nick Denton had raised an army of mercenaries:

 

 

It turned out that dogboner had not been totally on the level with them.

 

This is an outrage, if we can't trust @dogboner who can we possibly trust?

[sclpls]

Sorry for being super-dense, but can you please spell out for me why this is obviously not compelling evidence? I can guess at the usual suspects (fake, satire etc) but nothing's jumping out at me.

 

Probably has something to do with the fact that it doesn't read like something a human being would have written?

[JonCole]

It's also not compelling because GG has a pretty stellar track record of editing text posts and images to misrepresent people.

[Mangela Lansbury]

I honestly can't even keep up with all that shit, I'm more interested in hearing TB insist on something unreasonable, Totilo offer some other perspective, TB restate himself slightly differently, and then Totilo basically say they're at an impasse and should move on. I get a distinct feel that TB is just out to "win" while Stephen is more interested in showing that there is/can be nuance to some of these issues/"issues".

 

TotalBiscuit said some pretty similar things about the interview on 8chan -- how he just wanted to lay out his perspective, let Totilo say his thing, and then move on, letting the ridiculousness in Totilo's argument speak for itself. I'm not going to watch the video because I don't really like giving TotalBiscuit views (I don't like the content he produces, his political views, or his general media persona so I don't support him by viewing what he produces) so I can't really comment beyond "hey I saw this thing that TB said."

 

But knowing TB, he was probably an ass and just doesn't realize it.

 

Also, I just realized that the core of GamerGate's problems with "journalistic ethics" could be immediately solved if they just took the same stance I do on people who produce content that I don't particularly care for: don't consume it. There are plenty of natsec writers who I don't read because I think what they produce is basically beltway propaganda. I'm sure they don't care about that, and I've never really raised the issue with them (except with Joshua Foust that one time when I was really bored at a desk job where I didn't have any work to do ever last summer). It's basically just a personal choice that I've quietly made.

[JonCole]

I like how he refers to Internet Aristocrat as a "monster", as though it's up for debate. There are some people that don't deserve to be given a voice at whatever table he purports to be building. 

[Problem Machine]

Another episode of GamerGaters Losing Arguments with Bots

[Ben X]

It's also not compelling because GG has a pretty stellar track record of editing text posts and images to misrepresent people.

 

Probably has something to do with the fact that it doesn't read like something a human being would have written?

 

Ok, guess I couldn't see the woods for the trees! I assumed there was something there that made it obviously a bad fake or something as it was presented without comment.

[Bjorn]

Ok, guess I couldn't see the woods for the trees! I assumed there was something there that made it obviously a bad fake or something as it was presented without comment.

 

To me it reads like a super villain cackling to his minions about his plan to take over the world, which matches more with how some gamergaters seem to view Gawker than it does reality.

[Ben X]

Yeah, I was reading it thinking "man, this is really weirdly written, I can't even parse it enough to see why it's obviously fake", not realising that the weird writing was the give-away.

[Gormongous]

TotalBiscuit said some pretty similar things about the interview on 8chan -- how he just wanted to lay out his perspective, let Totilo say his thing, and then move on, letting the ridiculousness in Totilo's argument speak for itself. I'm not going to watch the video because I don't really like giving TotalBiscuit views (I don't like the content he produces, his political views, or his general media persona so I don't support him by viewing what he produces) so I can't really comment beyond "hey I saw this thing that TB said."

 

But knowing TB, he was probably an ass and just doesn't realize it.

I like how he refers to Internet Aristocrat as a "monster", as though it's up for debate. There are some people that don't deserve to be given a voice at whatever table he purports to be building. 

 

I really only knew about TotalBiscuit as a YouTube celebrity who used to get linked a lot in the comments of RockPaperShotgun reviews but hadn't been lately, so it's been really interesting to build an understanding of him almost exclusively through his efforts to be the "voice of reason" in #GamerGate...

 

Actually, no. It hasn't been all that interesting, because he's acted exactly how I've come to expect amateurs who build their careers on charm and wit to act when they're suddenly forced into prolonged contact with the professional field that they resemble and sometimes imitate. He still tries to grab the high ground using force of personality, but this isn't a YouTube video of just him talking, watched exclusively by fans, so his authority falls apart with saddening alacrity when challenged. He doesn't seem to know how to respond to opposing viewpoints beyond nitpicking, he can't seem to change his mind without moving the goalposts first, and he certainly doesn't know how to acknowledge and account for his own ignorance other than pretending it doesn't exist. I've tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but seeing him go onto 8chan and declare that Totilo making him look like a country bumpkin on his first visit to the big city of journalism was "just as planned" just confirms a longstanding suspicion that he's just a yahoo with an audience, spouting off without a care in the world unless what he says somehow impacts him and his friends directly. How someone with little professionalism and less self-awareness intends to position himself as the mediator of this great issue is frankly beyond me.

 

Basically:

I think he's coasted this far on the archetype of the dickish but smart, incisive, and funny British guy -- the problem being he's not actually that smart, incisive, or funny.

... basically he got there before Yahtzee did and put out more content.

 

I don't know, I don't get the people that #GamerGate allows to represent them, but then beggars can't really be choosers...

[osmosisch]

I remember TB from when he was just getting his WoW podcast going and dropping in on the SA forums. He's basically a laughingstock there because of this thread.

Apparently he was so annoying back then that I had him on ignore. Huh.

[BigJKO]

First and foremost I would like to say "Thank you!" to myself..

 

This, the first sentence, is just.. wat?! 

 

I am slaying a giant and there is nothing they can do about it.

...unless they read this Facebook post.

 

I mean, this is either such a big fake, that GamerGate will claim it was a fake fake.. fake.. by... us?..  to confuse them into not noticing.. he infiltrated.. them.. I lost my train of thought here.

 

Or it's a weird joke by Nick Denton.

[Nachimir]

Also if we go by a quote from Zoe on Eron's post, Zoe chea [sNIP]

 

Every time shit about ZQs private life gets rehashed somewhere, it cements some of the impressions GG spawned about her and erases a little more of her identity and privacy. Anything in the accusations as they pertained to corruption was disproven, and the rest is her private life.

 

For the sake of your own sanity, I'd advise ignoring TB. He's a twat, and I don't know why people are taking him so seriously.

 

 

 

 

It turned out that dogboner had not been totally on the level with them.

 

[Ben X]

I remember TB from when he was just getting his WoW podcast going and dropping in on the SA forums. He's basically a laughingstock there because of this thread.

Apparently he was so annoying back then that I had him on ignore. Huh.

 

That thread is fabulous.

[twmac]

Okay, so I listened to the whole thing.

 

Totalbiscuit is very leading with his questions but at least maintains a tone of civility. I think he imagines himself as some kind of Jeremy Paxman of the gaming world, asking the tough questions and getting the answers but it is weird because a lot of the things he ask seem kind of childish.

 

His closing statement about listening to the put-upon and not feeding the trolls is a nice one but at the same time - how will you know?

 

From my link a few pages back - the guy I spoke to on facebook seemed to consider himself a genuine member of the 'concerned' party (he went as far as to call me a troll) and yet his rhetoric was all troll. So if I then had stifled him, or ignored him, I would have been accused of censorship.

[syntheticgerbil]

Yeah I found out about that Something Awful thread a couple of years ago and it pretty much started the change in my opinion of some random Youtube guy who just talks about the games to noticing he's a drama causing narcissist who is more there to self promote and listen to himself talk. All the while he is a major component of the Polaris million dollar empire. I don't know how many millions he contributes, probably not much, but they do own Pewdiepie.

 

Totalbiscuit is very leading with his questions but at least maintains a tone of civility. I think he imagines himself as some kind of Jeremy Paxman of the gaming world, asking the tough questions and getting the answers but it is weird because a lot of the things he ask seem kind of childish.

The demanding an apology stuff is just over the top considering no one was directly harmed unless it was a GamerGater attacking and threatening women. And for juxtaposition, there's this this egregious personal attack which Total Biscuit has never apologized for.

 

I looked up some people discussing this podcast on Reddit and saw some of these "ethics now" dudes saying this is a "start." Start to what? An apology? If anything I felt like this podcast was very important and there's pretty much nothing else to say here. Leigh Alexander is not going to stop writing opinion pieces because there's a chance someone on the autism spectrum may cry. Totilo has made the policies as clear as they are ever going to be, made his changes to reflect these policies, and will err on the side of transparency from now on.

 

Two things from that podcast I found absolutely hilarious in how irrelevant they are:

1) Asking Stephen Totilo to discuss the ethics of *Polygon's* Bayonetta review. He has no say in that sites take on reviews and rightfully so. It's a site with a different opinion whether it's agreed or not.

2) Bringing up someone writing an article calling rabid Devil May Cry fans "babies." Again opinion pieces, and that fan outrage was totally ridiculous. That's one of the things I'm especially glad journalists are there to defend, because it turned into a weird witch hunt on Ninja Theory and Tameem. Those weirdo fans still follow around any piece of Ninja Theory news or Tameem articles saying negative things to this very day.

 

All of this consumer first shit is so stupid. The way I break it down is reviews are consumer first and will always subjective. Journalism is and should be always be developer first and objective as possible.

 

Like, what exactly is Total Biscuit asking for with this crap? For censorship to be had because of hurt feelings? This isn't hate speech.

 

Also further reading of this stuff on the reddit by Jason Shreier that I think is quite good.

[Denial]

Surprising nobody, it turns out that TB had not actually read the Zoe Post until yesterday.

 

I mean, I can't really blame him - it's pretty much unreadable. But then I am not the first citizen of a movement based on it.