'An Open Letter to the Video Gaming Community from a Self-Confessed Right-Wing Bastard'

I haven’t really followed “GamerGate,” because the last videogame I purchased had an Atari logo on the boxtop — or was it ColecoVision? (Which isn’t meant to sound condescending to those who are into videogames. Like a reformed heroin addict or model airplane builder, I just know I’d lose thousands of hours of my life getting sucked down the rabbit hole if I took up that hobby again.) But with a little editing, Milo Yiannopoulos’s new article at Big Hollywood, “An Open Letter to the Video Gaming Community from a Self-Confessed Right-Wing Bastard” is easily applicable to the MSM at large:

If I were a video games journalist, I’d be terrified right now, because I’d know that, for all my shrill protestations, sneering and arrogance, my industry had just entered a death spiral entirely of its own making.

The video game journalism industry, that is, not [many of the topics it covers] gaming itself, which [have] never been more vibrant. As I wrote last week, gaming journalism, populated by well-meaning liberals, has forgotten what it is for and become consumed with social justice activism, at the expense of writing intelligently about games [virtually every subject matter.]

To give just one example of the hatred between gamers [readers] and the journalists who are supposed to serve them, Chris Grant, editor-in-chief of gaming news site Polygon, is blocking his own readers on Twitter by the thousand, together with journalists and academics whose opinions he doesn’t like. It’s unprecedented in an industry that ought to stick up for readers instead of sucking up to lobbyists and the powers that be.

It’s also a remarkable display of political intolerance, not to mention a serious strategic error. Grant, and others like him, have given up any pretense of wanting to engage in dialogue with alternative opinions and instead hunkered down with a small but noisy minority readership of single-issue campaigners, feminist blowhards and perpetually angry “social justice warriors” to the exclusion of the backbone of his readership.

Read the whole thing, even if, like me, you’re not all that into videogames.

As VDH wrote in in late October 2008 about the MSM at large, as they ceased feigning even a shred of objectivity and completed their transformation into almost entirely Democrat operatives with bylines, “Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place.”

Of course, it had been a long time building; at the end of last month, we ran the video of the appearance of a Newsweek/Washington Post editor on C-Span in 1992, who told Brian Lamb that she enjoyed wearing a button that said, “Yeah, I’m In The Media, Screw You!”, and that “I think that sometimes I want to say to the electorate `Grow up!’”

The MSM really does think of its consumers as children, minds of tabla rasa to be molded into a leftwing worldview, objectivity and facts be damned. (Just ask them.)

As with journalists who cover politics, environmentalism, music, movies, and sports journalism, no one should be surprised that another subset of the profession has followed suit.