Fox doing what they do best
I saw this video posted on joystiq.com today. It’s the kind that makes every gamer grind their teeth. But these kind of reports are not uncommon for Fox, so obviously it should be taken with a large amount of salt. The channel is well-known to thrive in fear-mongering and poor journalism. Let’s look at this video as another case study.
We have, two “experts” (I put experts in quotes since Fox have been known to hand-pick and ‘educate’ their experts in the past). They both give their arguments. Both the phychology expert and the moderator admits that they’ve never even played the game. Then half-way through the report the relatively balanced argument is shoved aside for a panel of four conservatives of whom all share the same biased opinion. Neither of the four panel members seem to have played the game or in any case have any basis for what they’re saying and in the end I couldn’t help but to laugh out loud when they show their pity for the ‘unfortunate’ parents who have to look after their children.
[Update]
Jeff Brown of Electronic Arts, the (enormous) publisher responsible for Mass Effect responded to this debacle of a report, saying it was ‘insulting to the men and women who spent years creating [Mass Effect]‘.
Martha MacCallum herself brushes off the complaint. This story is most likely already behind her and she’s moving on to warn about the next parental fright.
[Update #2]
At first I thought this story would go away, to be forgotten and passed on as another good example of poor journalism. But evidentally I wasn’t the only one to take offense. Earlier in this post I pointed out above that Fox had a tendency to educate their “experts”. This case seemed no different and it turns out it wasn’t. To regurgitate what’s in the article; Cooper Lawrence (the woman psychologist seen in the report) said this an interview to the New York Times: “I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke.” She goes on to say: “Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography. But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.”
The thing that I find really unnerving about all this is not that a perfectly good game is being wrongfully treated by a mainstream outlet, or that it was such an obvious lie. It’s that it was a lie in the first place. It’s not uncommon for less serious news outlets to “spice up” their reports, but to invent news for the sake of ratings? That’s wrong in more ways than one.
