I’m going to have a piece up on #GGinRVA here in a bit. It was a really cool experience, but I’ll get to that later. It looks like I missed some prime media buffoonery while I was playing X-Men: Children of the Atom on Sega Saturn last night. If by some chance you also missed it, let me give you a short rundown, followed by some thoughts on the matter. Let’s begin, shall we?
Overnight, someone trolled a local news station down in Atlanta, Georgia into running a completely erroneous story tying the WDBJ shooter in with GamerGate. To put it simply, they got trolled. That’s actually a good thing, though. This station proved what we’ve been talking about for a whole year now. So, thanks WSB-TV. Here’s Ian Miles Cheong with more over on Gameranx:
An anonymous man contacted the WSB-TV news station in Atlanta claiming to know the shooter says he played the first-person shooter Counter-Strike with him for over three years in a group identified as GamerGate. They ran with the story (archived link) based entirely on these claims. Their news report was also broadcast on TV.
He then linked to the video, which I will do as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hva4EccGWV8
But they also ran the story online, with a quote from Margaret MacLennan (@MargaretsBelly), who happens to have been a guest on our last LIVE show:
When he saw the violent video Flanagan posted online the day he allegedly shot his former co-workers, the similarities to games he says he played with Flanagan were shocking.
“It’s crazy, because you see him standing there holding the gun. It looked like the game. It looks like the game we played,” the gamer said.
The day of the shooting, someone else tweeted: “Bryce Williams was a noted Gamergate supporter.”
(archive of story, which has since been altered without notification)
Here’s Margaret’s original tweet. By the way, when I asked her about the whole thing, she said: “If I could do it all over again, I’d make sure to mention 8chan, too.”
https://twitter.com/MargaretsBelly/status/636921491251142656
https://twitter.com/MargaretsBelly/status/637485092017975297
The whole thing is a absurd joke. I see some people telling folks to take it easy on this station because they’re just some local operation. Yes, that’s true. But they still have a responsibility to practice ethical journalism. Not only did they fail in this regard, they absolutely missed the entire fucking boat. Look at this shit:
I can't stop fucking laughing pic.twitter.com/GwNXp2walr
— Raida (@Doomskander) August 29, 2015
That’s what they’re basing their report on…an obvious troll. Even if you knew nothing about GamerGate, it would only take you 20 minutes or so to learn enough to know this isn’t something you should be running on local TV. Are these shitbirds really that desperate for viewers? Don’t answer that.
https://twitter.com/whenindoubtdo/status/637510496430784512
https://twitter.com/HiddenTara/status/637589218231848960
https://twitter.com/istheguy/status/637651958623535104
In case you hadn’t seen enough insanity yet, here’s a little bit more. Some two-bit hack jumped all over this fraud and decided to spread it. When she got correct by multiple GG supporters, she cried about muh harassment. This is the classic behavior of a psychotic SJW:
https://twitter.com/kmdes/status/637584675247026177
Fucking idiocy. Then again, we’re pretty used to that around here. Originally, I was going to paste the cover in this area, but it was so outrageous that I figured it deserved even more prominence. I’ll keep following the fallout from this, and I may even do another video later on today covering the subject. We’ll see how much time I end up having. I know one thing, though: we should spread the fuck out of this story. Show it to your non-GG gamer friends. Show it to anyone even partially sympathetic to the gaming industry. Paste the shit in forums across the Internet. This is a prime example of the type of slander and gamer-hate we’ve been facing for the last year. It also perfectly illustrates just how broken modern journalism truly is. Use this episode to our advantage.
