Today, Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart released another group of emails from the now widely known GameJournoPros, or Game Journalism Professionals mailing list. Basically, the final thread is full of emails of complete surprise over the uproar that the gaming community went into when its existence and content was revealed. Plenty of comments were said in a joking matter, implying how moronic it was for the community to be this up in arms. Well, this is definitely not joking or laughing matter.
Well i’m now in a cabal of elite journalists apparently. Thank a lot Obama!
yeah and my underwear is haunted.I’m excited that some of my many one-liners will finally become public!
Attention Milo! There are — drumroll — listservs of game devs too. Lots of them! ALL TALKING TO EACH OTHER. IMAGINE THAT.
The two groups talking to one another is obviously not comparable. The issue isn’t that a group of people, all of which share a profession, come together to discuss things, but it is the nature of the journalist profession. Game journalists are the first line of defense for readers from corruption and exploitation – they shouldn’t be in a position to actively participate in either of those.
If anything I feel like this has given the group new life! Let us persevere in the face of this weird idiot who doesn’t understand how anything works!
Originally I thought I would put some more quotes here, but they all fall along similar lines as above. Most are full of snark and jokes about how absurd they see the whole situation. How the existence of such a group doesn’t matter, about how they talk about their puppy pictures or other inane topics. Nobody cares that much of the discussion in the group could have been absolutely nothing and void of any significance. But, when threads like the original one about the Zoe Quinn scandal exist, and what was said/discussed there, then everyone cares. The potential for discussion like that, and the evidence that at least one happened, is more than enough to make this a serious issue.
The most incredible thing about the whole list has to do with that email from Kyle Orland above (which was not from this email thread, but from before). What is underlined is what Orland claims to be the inspiration for the group. The JournoList, which you can read more about here and on wikipedia, is pretty much exactly like the GameJournoPros list we see here.
A group of liberal journalists got together to discuss issues and stories they would run. In it they discussed killing stories because they might reflect poorly on Barack Obama, or calling their opponents (conservatives) racists to turn the issue into something else. That sounds really familiar doesn’t it?
This was the group that “inspired” Orland to create the GameJournoPros list. What was so inspiring about the list? The fact that it was full of collusion and obviously corrupted? There doesn’t seem to be anything redeeming about the JournoList, which also seems to have been full of the many tasteless/unfunny jokes similar to what is in this final thread here.
This is exactly why the issue here is significant and that the journalists involved in this group should not be laughing it off. Orland seems to misunderstand the role of a game journalist and what a role of a group like this should do if it existed, if it existed in a “good” way. Ideally, for game journalists, a group like this would be a place to discuss the trade – not discuss what they should report on. For a much more in-depth look at that line of thought read my original analysis here.
The fact that a genuine comparison between GameJournoPros and the JournoList can happen, not to mention that it happened at Orland’s prompting more or less, is more than worrying. Each member of that group should reevaluate what it meant to be there and the potential for what it meant to be there.
If those in the group did not understand that their participation in the GameJournoPros was worrisome before, then they should be downright ashamed now after the information about it got out. The fact that they laugh and joke about it shows how they truly don’t care to look at themselves critically.