Further, Gamespot changed the review in a manner which made it milder if nothing else.

The edit, coupled with taking down the video, coupled with the video edit, coupled with the experience and respected nature of the guy who got sacked, all points towards the conclusions made by the anonymous poster.

Also it doesn’t take studying business to understand business. All it takes is a modicum of common sense.

Speak to the most juniour person, they generally know enough to give you a hint as to where you should look and know too little to realise that they shouldn’t be telling you this stuff, then go check it out.

If the story is about where stocks are going, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to go check out the stock prices over the last few months and it doesn’t take a genius to read a sales report.

If journalistic integrity was dead in games journalism, why are we talking about the ethics of preview writing when you see mainstream publications barely and sometimes not even rewording PR content all over the place?

Anyway, in my four year tenure at GI, we never allowed ad sales to influence our reviews either and that was well before the junket issue had everybody realizing that we were actually accountable as journalists, not just fans who also happened to be writers.

I think the reason this whole thing exploded is as much because of post-junket perception of the gaming critical media by the mainstream press and the readers as well as a post-Bush distrust of journalism in general. That and to paraphrase GS’ editorial, Gamespot’s management couldn’t have invented new ways to make themselves look any more guilty of what Valleywag’s anonymous source was saying.

Both companies failed terribly at doing so. “No comments”, as even babies know, sounds a lot like “I’m involved”. Since that approach inevitably failed, Gamespot now admits everything, yet denies a link between Eidos’ pressure, the video review being taken off line and Gerstmann’s firing. Gamespot’s employees are either leaving or expressing their unhappiness through Gamespot’s own blogs. That is not “rumour”, but information.

Evidently, the review was not the sole reason for his firing, but it is very clear that:

1: The man in charge of firing people at Gamespot knows nothing about games or gamers, and very little about marketing, his alleged area. Check his published articles to see what I mean.

2: Gerstmann openly told people not to buy the game, at least not at its full price.

3: Kane and Lynch’s ads were all over Gamespot, and Eidos pressured Gamespot over the negative review.

4: Two weeks later, after all major games had been reviewed, and, thus, a staff mutiny could be handled, Gerstmann was fired. His video review was removed from the site, and his written review was blatantly altered.

5: Gamespot, at first, claimed to have altered the review because of the multiplayer mode. Now, they admit they changed it not just because of that, but to “fit” the 6.0 rating. This means Gamespot is openly admitting to having omitted information regarding the review’s change. Mind you, Gamespot’s business was, until this point, credibility.

Ignoring a potential relation between these known facts is definitely not journalism. These facts alone should have been enough for Gamespot to try and be absolutely clear about the termination. Admitting things they repeatedly denied after a week doesn’t make them look honest at all. The fact that these damage control “articles” are unsigned should also be very revealing.

To hell with any for-profit media.

Actually, it has.

“What happens, when you use the ideal of “neutral wording,” and then quote and report on what some figure has said, which is, in fact, a prepared, highly loaded, public relations statement, is you wind up making a prepared, highly loaded, public relations statement in your own voice. You just become a mouthpiece.”

I don’t see how that applies to previews in which the writer goes to see the build – it doesn’t even have to be a hands-on playable build. As for press releases, the words, “Blank claims that” is perfectly accurate. In addition, you can speculate on what the game is trying to be and comment on that. But saying something like “IT SUCKS!” or “IT ROCKS!” is unhelpful.

What happens, when you use the ideal of “neutral wording,” and then quote and report on what some figure has said, which is, in fact, a prepared, highly loaded, public relations statement, is you wind up making a prepared, highly loaded, public relations statement in your own voice. You just become a mouthpiece.

No responsible journalist can stand by and not provide context in the face of such manipulation.

All the major game publishers, and many of the smaller ones, have PR staff that know how to pull off this kind of manipulation. It’s taught in every University at this point, in euphemistic terms such as “conveying your message.”

The style of reporting that you yearn for is no longer relevant. I’ve seen senior reporters and editors across the country be made into dupes. See Bill Moyers “Buying the War” for instance, to see how Chalabi apparently manipulated skilled reporters into believing they had source corroboration. The whole industry, of which the games journalism industry is a tiny and relatively inconsequential facet, is reeling from such techniques.

The bottom line is, the less-than-ethical have figured out how to get outright lies printed, about far more important things than games, and the press hasn’t yet come up with a good procedure to deal with it.

You might as well ask such dishonest people what happened to journalistic integrity. Armchair quarterbacking won’t help.

(P.S.: I read through your comments, and you did not address the lack of primary sources and overall evidence in your article. You are attacking people with what appears to be largely anecdotal evidence, contradicted by first hand accounts in the comments, if everyone is who they say they are. Shoot me an email, I’d like to keep in touch.)