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Monday, May 18, 2015

You Won't BELIEVE What The Videogame Media Misreported!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - These so-called journalists should slow down and get the facts right.

In the old days of journalism, journalists cared about getting the facts right. They asked questions that needed to be answered for the report to go through: 
  1. Who?
  2. What?
  3. Where?
  4. When?
Journalism had 4 W's, and was ruined with Why. Editorials
Source: A CainTV comment. For comparison, here's a collection of KoopaTV comments.

And then... editorialists and people with an agenda added "Why?". Journalism as a field was twisted and facts took a backseat to opinions. Horrible websites like KoopaTV were created focusing on this "Why?", with other questions left unanswered, uninvestigated, or deemed unimportant. This has been going on long enough.

Now look at journalism today. Very sickening. As a product of our toxic culture, so-called videogame journalists have sprung up out of their basements trying to be the first one to cover the story. Of course, the first one to rush into a story is the first one to get it wrong. Beware anyone whose mission is to get you the news first. Examples to follow after the page break, so be sure to read on for more.

My favourite example in non-games media is that ABC's Brian Ross ("Chief Investigative Correspondent") blamed the Tea Party for the Aurora, Colorado movie theatre shooting. He found some Jim Holmes in the Tea Party around the area and assumed it's the same dude who shot the movie theatre. Of course, rather than actually investigate this claim further, ABC was all-too-happy to just portray the Tea Party as villains.

It's with that story in mind that I tentatively and carefully reported on Matthew Apperson and his interests when he shot at George Zimmerman. I wanted to be absolutely sure I was doing my due diligence when reporting that Mr. Apperson is a right-wing gun-nut. If it was false? Well, then we don't have any credibility. That's the risk with investigative reporting: You gotta go all the way and arrive at the truth. And the truth may differ than what your pre-conceived ideology may tell you. (What, you think I wanted to write about a fellow right-winger almost killing a dude, even if that dude is George Zimmerman? ...Or, especially if that dude is George Zimmerman?)

So let's look to the videogame industry. Last week, Nintendo Treehouse top dude and Shigeru Miyamoto translator Bill Trinen supposedly quit Nintendo of America.

He revealed this via Twitter, but quickly rescinded it. This was to hype up the E3 2015 announcement where Trinen does get fired at the end of the promotional video, but it doesn't seem to be canon to real life.

Bill Trinen Trintroll Twitter left quit fired from Nintendo
Note: Time between the set-up and the reveal is only eleven minutes.

Almost immediately, Nintendo fan-sites everywhere rushed to be the first one to cover the story. After all, the first one gets the clicks, retweets, follows, all that stuff.

Nintendo Everything Bill Trinen shoddy reporting left Nintendo
Nintendo Everything immediately publishes this.

I mean, you could argue it's good journalism since it covers Who-What-Where-When. But can you really say it's all that informative, especially given that it was written and published in under ten minutes?

Gematsu Bill Trinen no longer at Nintendo shoddy reporting bad journalism
All I know about what Gematsu wrote on it.

If you click that Gematsu link, you get a broken, deleted page error. So all we know is that Google result, and it obviously said in the article, "The wording of the tweet makes it sound like he left involuntarily." Well, that's as far from the truth as you can get, and Gematsu is covering up their faulty reporting. But we'll keep 'em accountable at KoopaTV.

Of course, Gematsu is also known for giving the world the "Gematsu Leak", which was a complete pack of lies.

NSider2 Bill Trinen leaves Nintendo bad forum suspicious journalism news guru YoshiRider123 Chrom untrustworthy
Disgraced former KoopaTV staff member YoshiRider123 reporting on NSider2.
So much for being a news guru. This was reported in one minute.

Yeah, no wonder we had to let him go. Imagine if he wrote and published KoopaTV articles in a minute. Nah, that's not how we work.

KoopaTV goes out of our way to take a long time to publish on the most recent news. And that's not because we're lazy procrastinators (well, most of the time), but because we're doggedly determined to bring you the truth and the facts. Oh, and levity takes some time to develop, so yeah. Anyway, facts take more than one minute to get. You gotta go through sometimes contradictory reports, and more than one source if you can get it. To be a smart producer of information, you gotta be a smart consumer of information, too.

Anyway, the videogame industry isn't just hits-driven in its titles. It's hits-driven in its news stories. Some articles go viral and spread around quick, and some are just filler. We know that on KoopaTV, too. So what increases having your article be a hit? Have it be the first of its kind, or contrarian for the hell of it. Have it be clickbait-y. (Like the title of this article.) Give it a nice picture to allow easy-sharing, and dominate search results with it.

It doesn't matter if the quality of the content is actually good for it to be a hit... just like the videogames that the journalists cover. It's disgusting, really. Whatever gets the most marketing bucks behind it.

So KoopaTV would like this practice to stop. Sloppy reporting is bad for everyone in the end, because people might not come back to the "updated" article. And why would they? They already got the message the first time, why would they ever go back to the same article? They don't know it's updated and Trinen was just joking.

Nintendo Life reports Bill Trinen left Twitter tweet Trintroll
Props to Nintendo Life for waiting seventeen minutes and therefore having a more accurate article.

So then people go the rest of their lives truly believing that Bill Trinen left Nintendo (he's still there, just to make it very clear), or believing that Jim Holmes was a Tea Party terrorist, or that George Zimmerman actually got shot in the head, or that Nintendo in Japan maliciously hate gay people. And that's no good.

All you had to do for this article's test case was just wait eleven minutes. Is that too much to ask?


KoopaTV prides itself on not being the first to break stories as they happen. Stay tuned to KoopaTV for accurate, well-researched articles on the videogame industry packed with truth and levity. You can count on KoopaTV. Anyway, feel free to comment on your favourite examples of the media misreporting by rushing, or just flat-out not caring to do their due diligence, and please share KoopaTV to your friends so they can replace their regiment of crappy sites with quality ones.


KoopaTV maintains a list of websites you can trust to get information from, and also a list of sources to avoid. Unsurprisingly, Nintendo Everything and NSider2 were already on the list. Gematsu will now join them.
KoopaTV is against #GamerGate, if you were wondering.
This is far from the first time Ludwig has railed against the mainstream gaming media. Here they collectively have it out against Nintendo.

2 comments :

  1. Replies
    1. I was gonna say to look at KoopaTV's other articles, but I guess wot's there ain't "news" anymore.

      (But hey, the opinions are timeless.)

      Delete

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