For starters, the relationships between writers and game developers is what it is. Sometimes there is one, sometimes their isn't - with the surge of independent game development is it really a surprise that these developers also tend to stem from or be connected to those that passionately cover the video game industry mostly because they enjoy the medium itself, rather than because they want a phat paycheck?
The wrong doing is the lack of disclosure, something some sites are actively trying to do something about. That being said, it's not inherently true at every site on the internet either. A lot of focus is put into the mistakes by the handful of "huge" video game websites, but ignore the fact that - when it comes to a majority of the coverage, there is nothing inherently wrong with it the way #GamerGate puts it. Do some journalists get sick of gamers? Of course - there is a minority of gamers, a sect of them, that really want to do nothing but degrade and attack anyone who writes something they don't agree with. I run a relatively small cookie website in comparison to say, Kotaku. At my site (Zelda Informer, for those curious), I can write an opinion piece that some of the fan base doesn't agree with. In return, I will be attacked and belittled over it. This is not the case for EVERY comment or tweet, but they are the loudest of them - making their voice be damn sure it is heard.
On the surface, I have a responsibility to understand the nature of any fanbase. We only have 300k or so fans on FB, with a net reach of say, 1.5 million viewers a month. We're relatively small time, and it's a lot easier for me to never take to heart any of the attacking remarks. I am sure working at a much bigger place, it is a lot harder to just ignore the attacks. Especially since they do sometimes get to be a lot bigger threats than I get. I've had threats against the life of me and my family, but no one has gone on to post my address to my face and send me pictures of my home from Google Maps, proving they know where my family and I are and can find us. They could if they wanted, but I know in general they are empty threats that can easily be made over the internet due to being anonymous. In general, most people wouldn't, to my face, say they would kill me and my family because they disagree with me.
Going deeper than the surface, this constant belittling of something we do, basically, out of passion... can lead to us being cynical. I am not afraid to admit I have told other staff members that our fans are acting like idiots - reality is that remark really only applied to a dozen of the commentors and not the other 200 or so of them, but it can get really frustrating, especially since we don't believe in any sort of auditing in our audience. Our fans can speak out as freely as they want.
I have no problems with people like Geoff Keighley. He openly admits that he is sponsored. He's transparent about it. Sometimes he does ask tough questions, other times he doesn't, and it's all too blatantly obvious when he doesn't (due to a sponsorship). Geoff was a big reason this thread started, but reality is that the problems with Game Journalism are less about "the handful of corrupt connections between writers and developers" and more about the integrity of the medium on the whole. I'm talking Journalism in general, not just game Journalism.
There is a sever lack of researching in our medium, and sites and writers jump all over the current hot story because they have a gut reaction to it (like all fans do) and they obviously know their fan base will be interested in the story. It's more about the story and how it makes us feel, less about trying to report actual facts. There is nothing wrong with rumor mongering in my mind, as long as it is labled as such. Posting something as a definitive fact without the concrete evidence to back it up is a big problem with Journalism. You can watch ANY news channel and see this happen every day, read any video game or other news outlet and see it too. Tons of "news", most of it with very little facts to back it up.
The problem is, specific to us, is that since game journalists really work out of passion more so than most journalists is that we're gamers like everyone else, we have gut reactions like everyone else, and we share those gut reactions in our work. We don't go the extra mile to prove or disprove a report, and we don't even do the bare minimum - where we can mention a current story but full diclose that we don't know the whole story, or we have a lack of sufficient evidence to prove it. It's fine to talk about stuff (we do it on GAF every day), but to report it means we must be willing to admit, within the text (and even the title when possible), that we don't have enough facts. Let the readers decided for themselves (like the Quin situation). We still don't have all the facts and we probably never will.
I also feel, slowly, there is this attitude growing that gamers (or whatever we call ourselves) just WANT gaming journalism to be more corrupt than it really is. Rarely are teh complaints about shoddy grammar, but shoddy reporting, yet we seem to take the stance of a cherry picking 20 or 30 stories and ignoring the fact that in between, there were hundreds if not thousands of stories that were just fine. This doesn't excuse the bad ones, but it puts the complaints in context - is journalism really any worse than it's ever been, or are we just wanting it to be worse than it is to justify a biased and jaded view people carry due to select number of incidents?
