"but when u consider the evidence there are legitimate complaints!" chips in some uninvited rando on Twitter, before linking you to a video speculating on Zoe's sex life in lurid detail.

Here's my thoughts on that: There are indeed legitimate concerns to have about games journalism. By far... BY FAR... the biggest source of these is the issue of funding. If you want good quality games journalism, someone has to be willing to pay games journalists grown-up salaries. More often than not, especially online, the money comes from advertising revenue paid for by the same big publishers that they are supposed to be reporting on. This is a conflict of interest that sours everything they print, to some degree or other - it's been so long since I read IGN that I genuinely forget they exist sometimes. As businesses these organisations have certain responsibilities to their employees (and, to a greater extent, shareholders) and it's inevitable that they'll conservatively support the people who pay them.

The fact that so much focus has been on the issue of two people having sex, instead of the ongoing multi-million dollar financial mechanisms that compromise the integrity of just about all professional games websites, speaks volumes. As the 'debate' shifted from simply harassing Zoe to crusading over JOURNALISTIC ETHICS, other connections between writers and developers were dug up by armchair detectives combing through old blog posts and twitter streams. And as this turd of a conspiracy theory has curled its way out onto the pig balls of public debate, it's also worth noting that the journalists and developers being accused of collusion are all being linked together because of their association with 'social justice' - nobody gives a fuck about Geoff Keighley's personal life, or who Reggie Fils-Aime is playing golf with, but any tweet that provides trolls with another half-arsed excuse to try and get Patricia Hernandez fired has traction.

IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE ISSUE OF 'JOURNALISTIC ETHICS' IS BEING USED TO CAST A VENEER OF LEGITIMACY OVER WHAT IS, AT ITS HEART, A CAMPAIGN TO ATTACK 'OUTSPOKEN' GAME DEVELOPERS AND JOURNALISTS.

This is the reason why no major news outlet is taking the campaign seriously - not because Zoe Quinn hacked Arsenal Gear and gained control over the internet.

There are campaigners out there who genuinely think that any friendship between journalists and developers is an immediate conflict of interest that illegitimises their reporting. I can sympathise with this sentiment, although I have to add that I think it's kinda misguided. I basically see two sides behind this line of thinking - people who have no experience of game development or journalism (who simply don't know what they're talking about) and developers who are angry because they don't know any journalists and feel unfairly ignored (which is a valid criticism of an unfair system, but I don't consider it a sign of moral decay - people can't write about you if they don't know who you are, and sadly there isn't some Meritocracy Fairy who will get journalists' attention for you, which is one of the many reasons I hammer on about the importance of networking in Advice For Students).

If you genuinely want to talk about journalistic ethics, I fully support you! My advice is to write down your complaints, wait until this current stuff has blown over (maybe a month or two?...) and then start asking questions instead of immediately throwing accusations around. Consider reading some books about the subject while you wait. At this point in time it's impossible to have any sensible discussion about these issues without some anon derailing things with irrelevant gossip about people's private lives - it's impossible to discuss 'legimate concerns' when they are so intimately related to this kind of personal abuse, and I'm not going to humour that.

Ethics, my arse.