Jezzascmezza said:
Why must the media hate video games so much? It's getting out of hand the number of times video games are blamed for influencing awful crimes
Scapegoat syndrome. Blame everything except the person who did the deed. Of course there HAS to be an underlying reason behind some psychopath's actions, and its always VIDEO GAMES. The media isn't about reporting truth anymore, journalism is dead and gone replaced by sensationalism and scapegoating.
Welcome to the information age, where there's no such thing as lying or distorting truth. Context? What the hell is that?
Living in an age where anyone can be interviewed about a subject and that interview will most likely be chopped up and distorted to make the interviewee look to be something he/she is not... Cue the Farnsworth "I don't want to live on this planet anymore".
Its sick, sad and a travesty that the once respectable career of journalist is now nothing more than tabloid journalism and political agendas instead of just reporting news.
I honestly liked it when news was the boring talking head reading the facts and moving on to the next news item instead of giving his/her absolutely uninformed opinion or showing clips of some other uninformed idiot speaking about a topic that has NOTHING to do with the situation. All this shit started with Columbine.
I'd just graduated High School but most of my friends were in their senior year when those two morons shot up their school. The day after Columbine all my friends were called up to the office one by one. A little backstory, my friends and I formed a group called EvilCON. Our group was basically a PC gaming clan and we made up a bunch of t-shirts with different slogans on the back along with our EvilCON logo and our online handles on the front. Our motto was "Preparing for the Ultra-Violence", a tribute to A Clockwork Orange, which some of our t-shirts sported. And yes we wore them to school. We played D&D once a week, attended big LAN parties and held our own little LAN parties on weekends with each other. Anyway I was working at the school at the time as assistant to my former drama teacher whom I was good friends with having attended an acting class with her. I came in that day after Columbine and was told I wasn't allowed on school grounds anymore by the campus cop and the principal. My friends were all taken into the principal's office one-by-one and threatened by the school's lawyer and the principal with expulsion if they kept hanging around together. All because we played video games and "fit the profile" of those two idiots. Sure some of us dressed in black (my wardrobe is mostly dark clothing because I find it comfortable) and wore various metal band t-shirts and of course our EvilCON shirts. The school also had downloaded our website and claimed we had "plans" on there for shooting up our school which was an absolute fabrication. So one of my friends got on the phone with some people from the Wall Street Journal and gave our side of the story: We were just a bunch of high school kids who played games after school, like a club. We weren't violent, not a one of us had ever been suspended or disciplined for fighting or anything of the sort. Half of our group were honor roll students and pretty much all of us qualified in the genius IQ range (not bragging). And all of us had been bullied at one time or another, but we never even thought of doing something so stupid as shooting up the school. Most of us were more concerned with college and didn't give a rat's ass about high school since it was almost over for us (it was over for me, and the time I spent there after I graduated was because my drama teacher asked me to assist her that year).
Well somehow our story got to A&E and they sent us a camera to document the things we did afterschool and followed that up with a camera crew at one of our big LAN party events. They shot 2 days worth of footage, a few interviews with us and wrapped up and left. We didn't see any of the finished product until it premiered. Our segment was part of a "documentary" on psychotic kids who had killed parents or friends, cult members and the like and we were the only ones out of that whole thing who weren't currently standing trial and didn't seem like nutbags but even so they skewed our story way out of proportion and tried to make us seem like violent psychopaths just waiting to blow up and shoot up our school...
So I say fuck journalism, fuck the media. They're all a bunch of tabloid hacks no better than TMZ.
