Okay, it’s not as bizarre as Mercedes Carerra ranting about Anita, but Mark Kern’s petition against Kotaku and Polygon is strangely uninformed, out of left field and… well, just plain wrong. Patrick Garrett has some thoughts here. So does Cara Ellison. But they left a couple of things out.

1. First off, let’s make one thing clear. Polygon, Kotaku and the other gaming sites have not been feeding this fire – they’ve actively been trying to ignore it. I documented this clearly in this article here where I noted there was far more coverage of the topic on Verge, Breitbart, Forbes and motherfucking CRACKED than on any major games website – despite many commentators and activists (including myself) actively shaming them for it. It wasn’t until the major media (MSNBC, New York Times, CBS, NPR) actually caught on to the story that the gaming press picked up on the thread again, presumably because it seems pretty shitty when a game-themed story hits the New York Times and your top five gaming site is pretending that shit doesn’t exist. Here’s a great example of IGN explaining why they choose not to feed the trolls. A week later, all these sites would drop that shit like it was a hot potato.

2. So this episode of Law & Order: SVU is gaming’s ‘Reefer Madness’? Um, sure. Look, shitty gaming related TV shows and movies have been on the television for YEARS. Here’s a CSI: Miami from the Jack Thompson days. The CSI: NY episode about Second Life is a wonder of badness that’s almost amazing to behold. Neither really resulted in much more than uncomfortable conversation, and I doubt that last year’s #46th ranked show is going to make much of a blip in their lowest ranked show of the year. If Furries can survive their CSI episode, I’m sure we’ll be fine.

3. It was not “relentless and histrionic slander” against all gamers. It showed a full game con of mostly peaceful, happy men and women playing and loving video games. It showed an Anita analog standing before a conference room of enthusiastic fans, cheering for a game that could be played both peacefully and through might. It tried to show the main protagonist of the show as being a hardcore, con-dwelling, Kotaku-reading, FPS-rockin’ gamer himself, even if the results of those efforts were unintentionally HILARIOUS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7faUHdlh9g#t=128

4. The episode was eye-rollingly bad at times, and yes, the ending was downright shameful. And yes, it clearly shows perpetrators who had taken things farther than any real life analog has so far. Still, let’s not pretend that its not based on fucking nothing. Some of the topics the episode tries to cram into a very short amount of time that are very much based on the reality that some people, particularly some women, have faced since last August include doxings, swattings, stalkings, constant rape and death threats, accusations of sleeping your way to success, threats of mass murders against public gatherings where prominent feminists are speaking, and lunatics screaming death threats to a camera to pander to an anonymous Youbute audience of nutballs, all of which, if you click on the links I’ve provided, link to some pretty clear analogs that have actually happened. I’m sure that if they’d contacted Zoe, Anita, Brianna or observers like myself, they could have written an entire fucking miniseries. It’s very nice that Mark Kern lives in a world where he hasn’t experienced any of this personally, but to be clear, this shit is still happening. Yes, it’s a tiny, tiny group of assholes doing it, but its impact is still huge on the people in its crosshairs.

It’s an insult to those who have been victimized over the last few months to describe what limited press that HAS occurred as ‘yellow journalism’. It’s even more of an insult to suggest that the press should be sweeping the very real fucking events of the last 8 months even more under the rug than they’ve already been. If Mark Kern was serious, he’d be talking to the people who are actually DOING the damage, not the ones who are merely reporting it.