Maybe you can explain this to me then. Why did you get so defensive when I asked Vain if #gg had said anything about the journalistic ethics accusations against Breitbart?

I'm having a hard time here mate... You sound so disingenuous... your bright line does not preclude other bright lines... open your mind will ya?

You kicked this off (me and you blabla) by saying you considered recurring payments to Blizzard for sumth like WOW as equivalent to Patreon recurring payments to some game dev.

Note how all those specifics came from you... Despite you later on saying you're after the general principles involved!

I told you already the big difference in kind for your example, which is whether the product exists or not. Similar to how a prepayment and a payment on delivery are different kinds of payment. Do you really see no difference in kind between buying a service and subsidizing an author? Can you give some closure here? Don't bring other examples, just go deeper rather than wider on why the distinction I'm offering is in your opinion invalid.

I really find it hard to believe you don't get that distinction. And by the way, I further notice you chose to elide my elaboration on journalistc objectivity, on journalists turning into entertainers, and on how the level of personal engagement of a reviewer in the product is in itself always a source of potential conflict of interest. Exemplified in your particulars by the time preference of paying for something that does not even exist - for whatever reasons: ideology, payola, ethics, affection, etc... Again, you elided this despite now saying you're interested in the general ethical rules!

And even if you don't get the distinctions, because I do see how you maybe are considering this from a higher level, treating all capital exchanges as almost equivalent, distinguishing only between buyer and bought: payments, prepayments, subsidies, bribes... they're all the same right? Well, the general points are still there if you would actually read with just a bit of openness...

Journalism's goal is to inform the public.
Journalists should strive to be fair, impartial, etc... I just say objective in short.
Journalists should strive to avoid conflict of interests or the appearance of same.

Are those general enough for you? I suspect none of the pro GG folks in here will disagree with any of those three.

How about you? Curious what you'll reply :)

For someone interested in the general ethics you kind of homed in only on the specific disagreement with me... see where my perception of your being disingenuous comes from? Go back to my very first reply to you and see if the general principles are or not implicitly present. I didn't reply to you with a one liner about the product not existing...

I'll give you points for one thing, which you mentioned yourself. You have indeed not derailed the ethics conversation with the typical character attacks I see from most aGG. Kudos for that.

I wouldn't personally consider Breitbart to be a member of the movement. He's had a bad reputation for many years and isn't exactly known for ethical integrity or really any of the values that GG stands for.
Despite the name, Fox News isn't news, it's legally entertainment TV and they have absolutely no responsibility for accuracy. They went to court with that years ago and one. Anybody that takes Fox News for a serious news outlet deserves to have their head examined.
Because that first G stands for Gamer, as in it's about ethics in gaming journalism. The problems with other forms of journalism aren't really relevant to the topic.

Are you seriously unable to recognize the problem with trying to recast this as a different issue? You're not a GG supporter, so your opinion of what we do and don't support doesn't really matter as far as deciding what we do and don't support goes..

Breitbart. Useful ally. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

So, in short, exactly as I suspected. The coverage was okay because YOU think it was justified. It doesn't matter that this individual gets four of her games covered by her former roommate. Because "everyone" with free to play games seems to get that sort of coverage right?

Heck, frankly, this is a case where disclosure really isn't enough. Because Patricia Hernandez violated every rule of journalistic ethics by REPEATEDLY promoting her friend's works. Not once, FOUR times. Yet here you are brushing it off like its nothing, that since you like the games, the ethical issues shouldn't be applied...

Is there any pro-aGG position you don't endorse? Is there any ethics issue you do find problematic from your obvious side? Or is this another case of your own side is right and the other side is completely wrong?
As usual the typical deception and distortion routine. What part of ethics in game journalism did you miss? But apparently in this topic of "ethics" you seem to find it ethical to attack ONE supporter of Gamergate over a completely unrelated issue that is all unverified rumor. Then continue to attempt to derail the thread with yet another unrelated topic. Oh how ethical of you?

Or better yet, your lame attacks on people here and then accuse them of being "defensive"...
People are smarter than you think, they see through your shenanigans.

Why are aGG questioning why we're defensive? They're the ones who can't argue naturally and have to wait till someone brings something up. If not; please describe to me and debate on how the following aren't stupid :

Cultural appropriation
all MRAs are worse than Hitler
People can have wrong thoughts
Why its bad to not be inclusive in media

I'll post more once you've convinced me on the first ones :D

That argument reminds me of the religious fringe in the U.S. arguing that the division between church and state is unnecessary. The basic argument is "X is good for me, therefore it's not a bad thing." Then someone points out that Islam is also a religion and you can see the gears in their head smashing into each other and bringing the whole thing down like the evil lair that smashed into Sean Bean at the end of Goldeneye. Whether you feel the system worked out well in this particular instance is neither here nor there, because the rules exist for reasons beyond those readily apparent. What about when someone is covered who isn't deserving of said coverage in your mind, someone whose politics and/or games you despise? Does it then become a problem when they're propped up without any mention of the relationship between them and the author recommending them? No matter who the developer is, someone is coming at this from that angle (I haven't tried AA's games, so I have no opinion either way), so dismissing that with your personal take on things seems a bit myopic.

Because I figured the only reason one could possibly have for bringing up something so needlessly political—especially since you've personally shown skepticism in the past that GG is about ethics, or at least entirely about ethics—is disingenuous shit stirring and/or distraction. Plus I was a bit sleep deprived and couldn't think up a more diplomatic way of communicating my suspicion. I'm probably not far off from a small vacation from this thread, myself.

We're all too often accused of being unfocused, and yet now we're supposed to shift focus to something outside of game journalism? We've also been accused of piling on people for perceived slights before anything is proven, but now we're supposed to speak out about some yet-unproven claims made by anonymous individuals?

Come on. You have to see the problems here, and I'm sure there are more than even that. Maybe we could all afford to be a bit more flexible if we hadn't had every ugly label possible plastered on us by the media, but we did, and now we have to be cognizant of that ridiculous narrative or else risk the conversation being sidetracked by even more stupidity.

Breitbart himself has been dead for years. Milo Y, though, was literally an appointed representative of Gamergate to a journalistic ethics conference. This isn't some kind of gotcha; it's just weird to be so blase about charges of journalistic corruption in a movement ostensibly standing up for journalistic ethics.

Look, I'm not disagreeing that the disclosure of friendships isn't a good idea. It is! "Anna Anthropy, a good friend of mine," fits into any article just fine.
But the rest of this is written like you don't know what video games are. If an article is written about games I think are garbage, I'll ignore it; or, I'll read it and say, "Those games still look like garbage;" or, maybe, in the best of all worlds, it'll be an article by someone who legitimately loves those games (and maybe the person who made them, that is a thing worth knowing) and I'll come out of it with a new appreciation for them. What harm has been done to me, gaming, or the world?

On one hand, you illustrate quite well that you understand neither the purpose nor the application of ethics in journalism (instead displaying a remarkable dose of nepotism), as taken from your post about Anna Anthropy. Fair enough, I don't understand Pokemon, and I don't need to.

But then, you go on to (misuse the word 'literally' to my chagrin and) implicitly accuse the people of GG of not caring enough about journalistic ethics. How can you claim any form of internal consistency, any fairness of intent when you do the opposite of what you want in others?

You're...not really clear on how ethical argument works, are you? The point of homing in on a specific disagreement is to work out the reason for that disagreement, determine which opinion(s) (if any) is/are correct, and make sure it doesn't introduce inconsistency into the larger ethical system.
There was mention of journalists' support for Patreons as a prima facie conflict of interest. I thought that led to an absurdity, namely, that the relevant qualities of Patreon were shared by other, apparently unproblematic, forms of commerce (MMOs, season passes, pre-ordering, etc.). So I tried to elicit a distinguishing factor of Patreon, and thus ensued a lot of circularity, accusations of bad faith, and changing the subject.
You're operating on two levels here: The hyper-specific ("This person wrote this about this game then, and that was unacceptable.") and the maximally general ("Inform the public."). Those both inform an ethical system, but they don't, by themselves, provide any useful rules. What does it mean to "inform the public," in the particular context of video games? Certainly something different from what it means in the context of, e.g., electoral politics ("Here's a cool new candidate you should try!" "How to get the most out of your Rand Paul").
So we have to work it out by considering what the purpose of games journalism is, what (specifically) we consider a successful result and why. Hence my pointing out that the actual result of journalists writing about their friends is often a good product; we have to know what we're striving for (beyond "ethics" and "objectivity," because those are meaninglessly general by themselves).
Likewise, knowing the specific features of a given situation that are ethically problematic is necessary to making rules that forbid destructive activities and allow or encourage beneficial ones. Hence the persnickety comparisons of unethical activities with acceptable ones, to make sure that, say, forbidding Patreon support also includes other activities that are unacceptable for the same reason but doesn't include superficially similar but ethical activities.
If you want to keep sneering at that kind of work as some sot of malicious distraction, you're welcome to, but then you don't get to pretend that you're the serious ones.

Hopefully soon.

I'm not blase about it. I just think it's ridiculous that people consider anybody connected with that rag to have journalistic integrity and this is the first time I've heard of this Milo being appointed.

What's more, what does that even mean? I wasn't consulted and I sure as hell wouldn't have approved anybody with connection to Bretibart being a representative.

The aGG folks really have to stretch in order to find problems.

EDIT: FWIW, he's not a GG supporter, he's a hater of feminism. And the only people that seem to think that he's associated with GG are journalists that are too lazy to do any research into GG. He's a convenient strawman for aGG folks, but it's pretty damn clear that he has no meaningful association with GG other than being able to use a hashtag.
Indeed, that's well needed as well, it's just not GG.

Right, so you are trying to justify why YOU and only YOU get to nitpick each and any statement while also implying how no one here is serious about ethics but you...

You are so rich...

A game journalist has a friend and roommate and decides to promote her games FOUR times. The Society of Professional Journalists as part of the Airplay debate called this a cut and dry ethics violation. Oh, but you like her games, so everything is just fine...this is what you call taking the issue seriously?

In terms of the Patreon debate, the vast majority of Patreons are about artists being funded by Patrons. It is not supposed to be a commercial enterprise. Many people have spoken about it and specifically when it comes to Kuchera and Quinn, anyone who isn't a moron can see that he supported her Patreon for reasons other than her "promised games". Clearly, he was already showing favor to her, which is a journalistic no-no. Not once have you chosen to address this, instead now you move the goalposts trying to claim that we need to prove that all Patreons are inherently problematic, and all of this because you call them similar to DLC. Both issues we have disputed and, as usual, you conveniently chose to ignore.

Why should anyone consider YOU serious when you don't seem to acknowledge anything anyone else even says? Instead the truth is closer to you trolling us...and making excuse after excuse why you are justified to do so...

If you don't want to debate in good faith, then it's simple...

You lose hands down, so go the heck home...