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By Nelson Schneider - 11/03/19 at 03:54 PM CT
This week, all gamers who place themselves further Right on the socio-political spectrum than ‘Woke Black Gay Trans-Woman’ were treated to a string of rumors and speculation that Kotaku, the formerly-Gawker Media-owned, formerly beating-heart of online games journalism, recently fringe-Left-wing propaganda mill, was in the midst of crisis, with staff being fired or quitting in solidarity in the wake of Word-of-God decisions handed-down by the site’s new holding company owner, G/O Media. Unfortunately, those rumors were mostly driven by Tweet-divination and wholly false.
The whole thing started earlier this week with Deputy Editor, Barry Petchesky, being fired by the overlords at G/O Media for not sticking to the subject matter of his journalism blog. Petchesky didn’t work for Kotaku, though, but its sister site, Deadspin, which is to sportsball as Kotaku is to gaming. G/O allegedly told the head of Deadspin to “stick to sports,” rather than focus on political activism.
Those of us who have grown tired of the insane fringe propaganda constantly being pushed by the former Gawker sites (Gawker infamously went out of business and sold itself after losing a lawsuit to Hulk Hogan in 2016), couldn’t help but wonder if other former-Gawker sites would receive the same mandate, and a handful of ominous Tweets by Kotaku reporter and Sorceress-boob-hater, Jason Schreier, added fuel to the fire.
But the truth behind the rumors and speculation turned out to be completely different. It turns out that G/O Media had signed with Farmer’s Mutual Insurance for a new ad campaign on their blogs. This campaign took the form of auto-playing video ads, which are, as we know, the poster child for overbearing, heavy-handed online advertising. Deadspin and Kotaku both published articles apologizing for the terrible ads, articles which were quickly pulled by G/O management. The “stick to sports” mandate was handed down immediately after that. Thus, we can clearly see that G/O wasn’t trying to get former-Gawker writers to stop writing about lunatic fringe politics and completely unrelated-to-sports-or-videogames nonsense, but to stop criticizing the bosses’ advertising decisions.
The after math of this debacle is nothing significant. Sure, all the Deadspin staff resigned in solidarity with their former boss, but sports journalists are a dime a dozen, so G/O will have absolutely no trouble replacing them. Alternatively, even if G/O decides to shutter Deadspin, the world will not be at a loss, since it is literally impossible to go/look/be ANYWHERE on Earth and NOT hear about sports (believe me, I try). Kotaku has experienced no such firings or resignations (yet), and will most likely continue doing what they’ve been doing for a decade already, finding misogyny, racism, homophobia, and all of the other fringe-Left boogeymen in every videogame released, then complaining about it. They’ll just add a new megacorporation to tip-toe around the same way they do Bethesda, EA, and Ubisoft. It’s too bad. I was rather looking forward to being able to read about videogames on Kotaku again.
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