Right now, media ethics is a very hot topic. It’s not only about video game journalism. It’s about any kind of media. People who care for this kind of stuff propose that we promote something called “Media Literacy” as a solution to all our problems.
“Literacy”, as you all probably know, is the 10 point perk which allows you to read this thing. Nowadays it’s not worth that much since many people learn it in elementary school. “Media Literacy” is different though. It’s not about merely being able to read things in the written media, but it’s more about seeing media and understanding its messages as they are. It is a sort of Brecht-like approach to our interaction with the internet, TV, movies, newspapers and similar stuff. It’s about knowing what’s happening behind the scenes and not simply looking at the shiny images we are presented and grinning like a moron. Reading the first issue of Tintin is literacy. Understanding that it is anti soviet propaganda on the silliest level of absurdness is media literacy. It’s a very nice thing.
Of course, promoting media literacy is a sort of acceptance of ultimate defeat. In a way, media literacy is a means to determine if anyone in the media violates the ethics of the job and how they do so. In a way it is accepting that the media is everything it’s claiming or trying not to be. Or maybe it’s a sad acceptance of reality instead of defeat. The goal may be stopping all the wrong things the media is doing by breeding a media literate generation of humans and rendering the aforementioned unethical practices useless. After all, what media literate person can claim Halo 3 is the video game sensation of the 21st century. Please…
The reason for all this is the existence of ethics, specifically media ethics, the source of which is journalism ethics. People who practice journalism are called journalists. Journalism, however, is not an easy thing to practice. This is why there are universities teaching it. Rules of ethics are usually important when a certain set of people are able to wield great power. As Spiderman’s uncle said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” These schools teach the responsibility needed to do the job. And it’s important since everyone would easily say the greatest power in this century is information. Journalists are merchants of information. They earn money for carrying pieces of information to society, and during that procedure they are perfectly able to modify or manipulate the information or create it outright. People act according to the information they possess. If you can control information, you can control people. And this, as no one can argue, is a great power. Therefore some rules are needed so that people do not exploit this fact.
Journalism ethics has three basic rules. Only two of them are important for the sake of this argument. These two are: Accuracy and Objectivity. And saying video game journalism doesn’t count as journalism at this point is akin to saying oral sex does not count as sex. So don’t do that.
Accuracy is about facts. Your story has to be truthful. Ideally it should contain the answers to the questions “what, where, when, who, why and how”. You have to tell the whole story. No fact should be omitted, for doing so would disturb the accuracy of the story. It is a journalist’s job to uncover reality. Rumors are not part of reality. A journalist can of course report on the latest rumors but they should be clearly labeled that way to separate them from facts. The job of an editor is also to check the written piece for its factual accuracy. Many organizations have “fact checkers” whose job is to make sure there are no factual errors in the story.
Objectivity is about the difference between opinions and facts. A journalist’s job is bringing facts to the reader. The reader then takes these facts and forms an opinion. Ideally, a journalist should express no opinions about the facts nor write the story in a way that it influences people into forming a certain opinion. Of course, journalists are free to express opinions too, but opinions and news should clearly be separated. In fact, many newspapers maintain entirely different staffs for opinion stories and news stories. This is not enough. Editors should make sure no opinions are presented in news stories.
Partly related to objectivity is independence. The independence of a newspaper is its guarantee of objectivity and truthfulness. Therefore, advertisements should clearly be separated from the main body of the story. You cannot, for instance, change the logo of your newspaper to look like the ExxonMobile logo as an advertisement even if your stories are not biased in favor of that company, because simply doing so would create a nasty question mark in the minds of your audience. A question mark about your truthfulness and objectivity.
If you think about it even for a second, video game journalism today totally ignores these rules. You often see factual errors in news reports and reviews. More often than not, rumors are presented as actual news. News headlines almost always contain hidden opinions or cynical remarks, which to many game journalists seem like a good way of showing off their wittiness. No one seems to wonder why real journalists don’t do this kind of thing.
And how many times have you seen your favorite video gaming site totally skinned in that new AAA title’s colors with several previews describing how awesome that game is?
Sure, AAA titles from big companies attract more attention than the indie title from some unknown company, but that’s neither the journalist’s problem nor the reader’s. By giving more exposure to the bigger game, these journalists cause the death of the smaller fish in the sea and act as the right arm of the bigger companies. This might be in the best interest of the magazine or website in economical terms, but economical dependence on an outside source is hardly proof of your independence, objectivity or accuracy.
What should the journalist do if he has no other choice but violating these rules? Well… the journalist should quit his job. If all journalists do that, the firm grip of corporations over media have no choice but loosen up. Of course this happens if the journalist cares about being truthful, objective and independent in the first place, or in fact, if we are talking about journalists at all.
Because I think we are not. And this is at the heart of the problem.
You cannot really blame these people for not acting according to the ethics of journalism the same way you cannot blame a faith healer for not acting according to the tenets of the Hippocratic Vow. A faith healer can perfectly choose not to help save someone’s life just because he doesn’t like the color of his eyes. This would be a very immoral choice, but it would not be ethically incorrect simply because the faith healer is not a doctor and therefore not bound by the rules of being a doctor. He never learned the importance of those rules. He never thought about the philosophy behind the rules. Therefore you also cannot expect him to act like a doctor.
And because he is not a doctor, he cannot violate their ethics just like a coconut cannot commit murder. In the rare cases a coconut causes the death of a person we don’t call the event “a murder”. We call it “accident”.
The so called game journalists today are not really journalists. Most of them didn’t study it at all. Quite many of them have trouble writing coherent sentences in their own language.
They are not journalists. They are kids. Fans of games who have just grown up a bit and are now earning money by writing down their schoolyard conversations. They are doing okay because they know more about games than most other journalists, but that’s it. Similarly my cat knows more about being a cat than me but that doesn’t mean she should write about the subject in a magazine.
Some video game journalists stay really true to these ethical rules purely by instinct and write really well because of a thing called talent. What can I say? They should not take offense. I guess with enough cats running across enough keyboards, you’ll eventually get a good article about Halo 3 (only monkeys write Shakespeare).
What video game journalism needs most is journalists and some really serious websites or magazines which take the ethics of journalism seriously. This is the first step towards building a reliable and functional games press. We should simply thank these guys for what they did so far and find a way to replace them with proper journalists somehow.