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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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When I follow discussions like this here I wish I were a faster and more disciplined thinker.

I struggle with these arguments you linked to, JonCole, and my disagreement is probably not entirely justified considering how I think about them. In my mind I'm very defensive about it and move the goalpost almost immediately. And I'm not sure why, because when I express myself through art, I always tend to make use of my local culture anyway.

Okay, back to learning....

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SPJAirplay is causing some interesting splinters in KiA.

 

1. Some people think that ethics in journalism are what GG should be focused on, and that was what SPJAirplay was about. These people point to the morning panel of Airplay as being a success.

 

2. Other people think that ethics don't matter and are just a vehicle for fighting SJWs, feminists, etc. These people think that Airplay was a failure, in part or in total, because the PM panel (starring Milo and Sommers) was "too heavily moderated" to be about ethics. I guess most of the GG reps tried to make the PM panel about a culture war, and Koretzky shut them down repeatedly and asked them to "stay on topic."

 

Airplay is making both groups more vocal. Which means that on KiA, people within GG who say "It's about ethics..." are being shouted down by their own fellow members and told "No it's not, it was never about that - you're just an SJW like the rest of them, you don't get it."

 

This exact split has played out before. The last person who ran KiA was a redditor named Hatman or something. While he was in charge, he and the mod team tried to implement a rule that would flair all SJW focused threads as "off topic." A flair on reddit, if you don't know, is like a little label that appears next to the thread title. It's how active subs label things and create filters - so if you go to a subreddit about recipes and only want to look at dinners, for example, you can just look for the dinner flair to make searching easier.

 

The reason for wanting to add this flair was to make KiA more focused - on supposed ethics. There was even talk of splitting off all SJW focused posts into a different subreddit, so that KiA could focus exclusively on ethics.

 

Anyway, to make a long story short - Hatman was basically abused day in and day out for being a "fascist" who wanted to censor content by labelling it as off-topic. He got the royal treatment. One time he tweeted something polite to Brianna Wu, and that day there was a big thread about what a traitor he was and how he was selling out the community. It was just a tweet that had nothing to do with anything...but Wu is "the enemy" in anti-SJW circles, so of course he was crucified. He had to take a vacation to de-stress from the whole thing. And when he came back, he basically threw his hands up and said, "This is not the community I thought it was. It's different now. And I'm no longer the right person to lead it."

 

So, that's just two times that I've noticed. But it's interesting to me that in both cases, when the community was pressed on the same point (is GG about ethics or fighting "SJWs"?) it bent at the same angle, like a sagging piece of plywood.

 

I doubt any of that will surprise anyone in this thread...but that's how things seem to be moving.

 

And I could be wrong - it's just my impression based on what I've read and seen. Corrections welcome!

 

Edit: Basically what Vainamoinen said above. I'm sure they'll have much more astute things to say than me once they watch the panel! I've only been following the reaction.

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...he/she, whatever, it's OK. :)

 

If Koretzky really denied panelists the central gamergate conflation ("ethics in journalism MEANS exterminating SJW"), the guy needs a badge after all. But we'll see, we'll see. Maybe the ethical question is whether whitewashing of the movement's history should be allowed if the movement, then bereft of their ideological core, actually comes out clean and sober. :mellow:

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I know we kinda moved past the cultural appropriation discussion because (in my perspective) we reached an impasse, but I just saw this series of tweets and felt it germane to those I was disagreeing with - https://storify.com/JonathanACole/cultural-appropriation

 

I'm still interested in that discussion, so I've made a post over in the Social Justice thread where it's more on-topic. I encourage anyone not yet tired of this debate to go there.

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Forbes covers SJP Airplay, surprisingly well and in some detail. Kudos, Mr. Griffiths.

 

I think you messed up the link, here's the actual article, and I agree that it's excellent and quite detailed. However, as always, the comments are worthless, although mostly unoffensive this time, since they're all #GamerGate people harping on minor factual inaccuracies and a general failure to accept their movement on the terms that they themselves set...

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Yup. And they're doing their very best to reiterate the Central Gamergate Conflation in the clearest possible terms and the most colorful variations (my italics):

 

The reason people from different parts of the political spectrum and with different motivations [...] is that the culture war and ethics issues are overlapping to the point of being inseparable. Most of the people most intently pushing for more “diversity” [...] are some of the worst offenders against truthful reporting, and conversely the same appears to be true.

 

In other words, the SJW are all crooks because they're SJW. Thanks gamergate for this perpetual, wonderful example of circular logic.

 

I've seen the discussion continue right as before elsewhere as well. Gamergate's advice to listen to Airplay has obviously been heeded... but they themselves fail to understand what has happened there. ^_^

 

It's too early to tell, but it seems to me that gamergate would rather not be reminded about what actually happened during Airplay. It's now that "bomb threat" monument to gg history. If this proves true, in the long run Airplay will have meant nothing to the movement – which might be a good thing, eventually. After all, more than a few gaters I've seen were convinced that the final solution for the SJW question would be found there. :wacko:

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Well of course, it's about ethics in journalism after all. The case is discussed all over KiA, the Ralphretort has written four irate articles since Wednesday and John Bain hasn't stopped scolding his colleagues on twitter about it.

 

Thanks for nothing, #gamergate.  :mellow:

 

 

(I'll say it because I have to though: Kudos to Bain for his Target related tweets)

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Ugggggggggg: "More women, writers of color have been winning Hugos lately, and that's caused a backlash from a group of mostly white male writers and fans. They call themselves the Sad Puppies. NPR's Petra Mayer reports on how this year's rocket ship is getting dented."

http://www.npr.org/2015/08/19/432910333/as-more-women-minorities-win-hugos-sad-puppies-blast-sci-fi-awards

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Ugggggggggg: "More women, writers of color have been winning Hugos lately, and that's caused a backlash from a group of mostly white male writers and fans. They call themselves the Sad Puppies. NPR's Petra Mayer reports on how this year's rocket ship is getting dented."

http://www.npr.org/2015/08/19/432910333/as-more-women-minorities-win-hugos-sad-puppies-blast-sci-fi-awards

Doesn't surprise me.

 

White supremacy--especially white male supremacy--has had a long legacy in sci-fi and now that slowly losing power, those white writers are scrambling to try to hold on to it. A lot of what they complain about is the same cliche, garbage that gets spewed when PoC and women start to gain power and shift the power structure.

 

These same people are the same ones that fucked with the Hugos and Nebulas and other awards. Fuck 'em.  

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Ugggggggggg: "More women, writers of color have been winning Hugos lately, and that's caused a backlash from a group of mostly white male writers and fans. They call themselves the Sad Puppies. NPR's Petra Mayer reports on how this year's rocket ship is getting dented."

http://www.npr.org/2015/08/19/432910333/as-more-women-minorities-win-hugos-sad-puppies-blast-sci-fi-awards

 

Has there been a major update recently on this? The Sadpuppy fiasco has been ongoing for quite some time now (I suspect it's even been discussed in this or the Social Justice thread).

 

Just wondering if something prompted this NPR story in particular, or if they're just catching wind of it now.

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Has there been a major update recently on this? The Sadpuppy fiasco has been ongoing for quite some time now (I suspect it's even been discussed in this or the Social Justice thread).

 

Just wondering if something prompted this NPR story in particular, or if they're just catching wind of it now.

 

I think they're just catching wind of it. The actual con itself is happening right now, which is something about which NPR is much more likely to report than a couple of intersecting online conspiracies to fix the most prominent award in sci-fi. Overall, it seems mostly like good coverage, although I'm wincing at the bluntness of it all. They really make it seem like outsiders vs. insiders, near the end.

 

For those who haven't been following the saga of several right-leaning authors forming a conspiracy to get them and their friends nominated because they felt they deserved a Hugo now, and then that conspiracy getting hijacked by easily the most hateful person in sci-fi and fantasy literature, it starts here in this thread and continues intermittently. Thanks to Merus, my favorite piece of writing on the movement has been by Philip Sandifer, although Eric Flint has really impressed me, too. I always thought that the latter was your typical neocon fantasist, given that his most successful series is a modern American town getting transported wholesale into the midst of the Thirty Years War and kicking a ton of ass, but apparently he's been getting his head cracked for the left since the early seventies.

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Gamergate's advice to listen to Airplay has obviously been heeded... 

 

Wel, to an extent - but not actually to the point of actually watching it. Combining the official stream and the parallel stream allowing chat, about 5,000 people max were watching at any given time. To contextualise, Fish Plays Pokemon had a high of 12,000 concurrents.

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I wanted to talk about this elsewhere after looking into it some more, but honestly, it's increasingly insensible to talk to the few remaining gamergate supporters, so sorry for the thematic double post.

This is a major case.

 

In comparison, the 'corrupted journalists' according to deepfreeze do not nearly have this kind of audience, and not nearly as loyal an audience as well. We all know what power Let's Players wield as opposed to their typing counterparts; they are still allowed to be enthusiastic about games and game developers without being accused of "corruption". This is gamergate's cardboard house of violently called for disclosure soaked in gasoline and lit on fire. The reasons why these offenders are safe are clear enough:

These youtubers didn't cross the hatemob.

Didn't write about harrassment.

Didn't talk about gamergate unfavorably.

Didn't write reviews that dared to comment on cultural context.

That's why they're safe from gamergate activism.

That's why the industry corruption is safe from gamergate.

That's why the actually corrupted love gamergate.

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I wanted to talk about this elsewhere after looking into it some more, but honestly, it's increasingly insensible to talk to the few remaining gamergate supporters, so sorry for the thematic double post.

This is a major case.

 

In comparison, the 'corrupted journalists' according to deepfreeze do not nearly have this kind of audience, and not nearly as loyal an audience as well. We all know what power Let's Players wield as opposed to their typing counterparts; they are still allowed to be enthusiastic about games. This is gamergate's cardboard house of violently called for disclosure soaked in gasoline and lit on fire. The reasons why these offenders are safe are clear enough:

These youtubers didn't cross the hatemob.

Didn't write about harrassment.

Didn't talk about gamergate unfavorably.

Didn't write reviews that dared to comment on cultural context.

That's why they're safe from gamergate activism.

That's why the industry corruption is safe from gamergate.

That's why the actually corrupted love gamergate.

 

I just checked KotakuInAction because I had trouble believing they wouldn't care about this. A Polygon article on the topic is linked under the title "Polygon suddenly decides to start worrying about ethics...oh, the irony!". The thread has 16 comments, 15 of which are angrily snarking about how Polygon has some kind of unspecified history of being bad at journalistic ethics. Further down there's a 28 comment thread linking a similar article which mostly features calm "Yup, they did a bad thing I guess" reactions, exactly one commenter suggested anything should be done about it. In five pages of Reddit, that's all there was.

 

Their reaction to the Polygon article was the most telling: even if Polygon are being hypocritical, you'd think a reasonable person would still care about the bad thing they're reporting on.

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For those who haven't been following the saga of several right-leaning authors forming a conspiracy to get them and their friends nominated because they felt they deserved a Hugo now, and then that conspiracy getting hijacked by easily the most hateful person in sci-fi and fantasy literature, it starts here in this thread and continues intermittently. Thanks to Merus, my favorite piece of writing on the movement has been by Philip Sandifer, although Eric Flint has really impressed me, too. I always thought that the latter was your typical neocon fantasist, given that his most successful series is a modern American town getting transported wholesale into the midst of the Thirty Years War and kicking a ton of ass, but apparently he's been getting his head cracked for the left since the early seventies.

 

I went to college in the same county in West Virginia the fictional town of Grantville was supposed to be in during the time period it was transported in the story (2000 according to wikipedia)...the town was based on Mannington and I vaguely remember going there once or twice as a kid.  I never have read the books...but I've heard about them several times because a lot of people from West Virginia (and I have this tendency myself I will admit) get really excited when we're mentioned anywhere resembling a national level...I don't know if that's normal everywhere or not (as I've never lived in another state for any long period of time).

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a lot of people from West Virginia (and I have this tendency myself I will admit) get really excited when we're mentioned anywhere resembling a national level...I don't know if that's normal everywhere or not (as I've never lived in another state for any long period of time).

A billboard fell in the suburb I grew up in and it made it on the 24 hour news cycle (slow news day combined with the proximity to CNN HQ, I guess). It was a bigger deal locally that we got national attention than that someone died. It's not a unique phenomenon, but I don't understand it...

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It looks like the Sad/Rabid Puppies have been annihilated at the actual Hugo voting, with "No Award" coming in first in most of the categories with a Puppy nominee. i.e. sci-fi fandom basically decided to blow up the bridges rather than risk a Puppy nomination getting across. This will presumably make for either a very short awards ceremony or one with very long speeches.

 

Pretty much inevitably, the Puppies have claimed victory and tagged in Gamergate to make noise about it.

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It looks like the Sad/Rabid Puppies have been annihilated at the actual Hugo voting, with "No Award" coming in first in most of the categories with a Puppy nominee. i.e. sci-fi fandom basically decided to blow up the bridges rather than risk a Puppy nomination getting across. This will presumably make for either a very short awards ceremony or one with very long speeches.

 

Pretty much inevitably, the Puppies have claimed victory and tagged in Gamergate to make noise about it.

 

This is not quite accurate and a little inflammatory in comparison to what happened.

 

No Awards were not given in "most of the categories with a Puppy nominee." They were given only in 5 categories, in which all the nominees were both (1) all from the Puppies Slates and (2) those puppy slate nominees were of low quality and/or obviously there for political reasons. (So, for example, Guardians of the Galaxy still won for best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, even though it was on a puppies slate, because obviously the movie itself was not affiliated with the puppies movement. Works did not appear to be voted down out of spite for being on a puppy slate, but instead based on whether or not they were good or bad. As it happens, almost all of them were very bad!)

 

They absolutely did not "basically decide to blow up the bridges rather than risk a Puppy nomination." They did a sensible thing and used the standard Hugo runoff voting system to rank No Award above bad works. A calm and level headed reaction playing entirely within the preexisting rules, and assigning awards based on the artistic merit of the nominated works. 

 

If you read GRRM's blogs handicapping the Hugos from a few days ago and compare it to the list of winners, it gives good context for what happened.

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Since Worldcon released the Hugo voting data last night (as they always do after the ceremony), I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how many Sad / Rabbid puppies actually voted. Using this article's selection of the short story category as a useful guide, it looks like:

 

Nominating Phase (1174 ballots cast, each is allowed to vote for 5 different works):

  • Exclusively part of Rapid Puppy slate: 497 votes
  • Part of both Puppy slates: 456 votes
  • Exclusively part of Sad Puppy slate: 372 votes
  • Total votes cast, assuming everyone voted for 5 works: 5870 votes

Final Ballot (5267 ballots cast):

  • No award: 3053 votes
  • Exclusively part of Rabid Puppy slate: 944 votes
  • Part of both Puppy slates: 874 votes
  • Exclusively part of Sad Puppy slate: 396 votes

The Sad Puppies seem largely irrelevant. Yesterday's awards were much more about the Science Fiction / Fantasy community repudiating the Rabid Puppies.

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