Those following GamerGate may recall when noted GamerGate critic Veerender Jubbal, coiner of #StopGamerGate2014 and hater of white people, was defamed widely in the press as one of the ISIS terrorists who attacked Paris in November, based off a photo-shopped selfie showing him in a suicide vest. While GamerGate inevitably became the popular target of blame, one Vice article went much further in claiming to offer clear “proof” that GamerGate supporters were the ones who used the image for defamation. Most of the evidence was nearly a year old and more recent proof was incredibly flimsy.

GamerGate supporters such as myself were actually quite familiar with Blacktric, the person responsible for spreading the photo-shopped image to smear Veerender as an ISIS terrorist. Even though he did support GamerGate at one point, by late 2014 he had became associated with a group called AyyTeam. Consisting mainly of former GamerGate supporters who had grown frustrated with the increasing focus of other supporters on restraining bad behavior, AyyTeam became notorious for trolling or attacking GamerGate supporters and even getting them smeared in the press as was the case with one cringe-worthy BuzzFeed article whose unusual update was covered by AdWeek.

Knowing AyyTeam’s history I contacted Vice Gaming Editor Mike Diver at his public work e-mail offering to write a guest piece for Vice focusing on the group, Blacktric’s association with it, and its history of smears including its history of tricking news outlets.

Since Vice had a history of shoddy hit pieces against GamerGate, I can’t say I entirely expected to get a response let alone for my pitch to be accepted, though I certainly hoped it would be approved. The rejection I got from Diver, however, was more frank than what I had anticipated.

For a journalist at a major news outlet to say there was no interest in a follow-up clarifying or correcting his outlet’s reporting because they had a rule of effectively blacking out coverage of GamerGate to force it to die struck me with surprise. I was not surprised by the act as it is exactly the sort of behavior I have come to expect from the news media, but I was surprised that an editor would bluntly admit this is what they were doing. Moving on from that rejection I also reached out to The Guardian’s gaming editor about potentially doing the response there, since they had also claimed a GamerGate connection, but was met with total radio silence.

A week after my pitch to The Guardian, I decided to try for Kotaku given parent outlet Gawker’s reporting on the photo-shop suggesting GamerGate was involved. Despite offering a fair assessment of GamerGate in his response, Kotaku editor Jason Schreier simply dismissed as “impossible” that anyone could argue against a person being in GamerGate since it “is a platform that anyone can use” and said he was not interested in the article.

I had also attempted to contact The Daily Beast given Arthu Chu’s piece blaming GamerGate for the smear, though I did so by contacting an editor through a form on his personal site as I could find no other means to contact them so the lack of response may be due to my method of contact.

A day after that came the incident where the Associated Press had posted an interview with a “witness” who claimed to have encountered one of the San Bernadino shooters saying he wore a “GG” shirt and told her he was doing it “for necessary ethics” in obvious reference to GamerGate, a story which made its way into numerous major news outlets via the AP wire. Digging around, I remembered the user responsible, JewyMarie, was also associated with AyyTeam (Note: For those who may recognize that handle as belonging to the notorious Airport this was after Airport moved to another handle and Marie had used the same name on CNN). Seeing yet another AyyTeam connection to a major smear against GamerGate, I contacted Diver with this new development.

He requested links regarding the story so I sent them in and after a week and a half with no response I queried about whether he was interested in it and he once more reaffirmed that there would be no follow-up.

I subsequently followed up with Schreier at Kotaku and received no response from him. Although I was not happy with Diver’s insistence on not allowing an alternative perspective grounded in evidence after their outlet asserted as indisputable truth that GamerGate supporters had carried out the smear against Jubbal based off extremely weak proof, he was the gaming editor and he was free to run the section as he pleased so long as his bosses approved.

He apparently didn’t think it was necessary to report about the Associated Press and, by extension, The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, Fox News, and others being fooled into publishing a false report accusing GamerGate of being responsible for an ISIS-inspired shooting after running a piece claiming GamerGate was responsible for similar false accusations against an opponent. While I found that absurd and felt the story in its full context with AyyTeam’s history of getting false smears to show up in major news outlet would be rather interesting to a wide audience, I at least assumed he truly was done with talking about GamerGate and only would do so if he considered it of the utmost importance.

So imagine my annoyance when this article written by Mike Diver himself popped up two weeks ago. I guess someone decided to point out that Brianna Wu’s game Revolution 60 looks terrible by comparing it to a PSOne game and so Wu went on about how it is “technically” better graphically than any game on the original Playstation. Most would acknowledge it was just a criticism of the game’s unpleasing design aesthetics and not a serious assessment of whether a new 3D iOS game could technically run on a game system released in 1995, but Diver apparently decided Wu’s rebuttal was important enough to warrant an article on a site ranked in the top 100 in the United States.

This is also fine as the fact Brianna Wu managed to use a much more technically impressive platform to make a game that looks like road pizza compared to Crash Bandicoot (as well as numerous Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games) and wants all the haters to know that is a perfectly legitimate, if trivial, thing to treat as news. How Diver introduced the subject is what irked me as he made a point of several times mentioning GamerGate, albeit by treating it as a censored naughty word and equivalent to invoking the name of Lord Voldemort, and insinuated that this person criticizing Revolution 60 is someone affiliated with it as though only their fictitious women-hating boogeymen could possibly think ill of a game designed by the person who made this artistic trainwreck.

For most GamerGate supporters who saw this article by Diver they would think nothing of it other than that it was a ridiculous thing to write a story about and even more ridiculous to treat GamerGate as “He who shall not be named”, but for me it was like a slap in the face. I went to Diver offering to not only correct a major claim they had published, but also give him a story about a small group of trolls who have been able to repeatedly fool the mainstream media into spreading ludicrous claims about their opponents across the world and was told it wasn’t important enough to run. Diver told me the Veerender article was Vice Gaming’s last GamerGate-related article and he wouldn’t do another unless it was absolutely necessary.

Learning that after those claims not only had Vice Gaming published an article trashing GamerGate over a completely inconsequential story, but that Mike Diver had written it personally just drives home to me the corrupting influence of ideology on the news field. No idea how an editor for a major media outlet can seriously think one of the pillars of Western news reporting getting a nonsensical hoax published in The New York Times and Washington Post is less worthy of a story than a one-bomb wonder relentlessly defending a terrible-looking video game to a random nobody on Twitter, but apparently this is the state of journalism today.