Ethics

I meant to post this last week - even had it drafted. But for some reason, I forgot. Dunno why. Anyway, here it is - a week late. :p

You are probably wondering what ethics has to do with games. Well recently, there was a storm on Kotaku. You can read more about it here.

Basically, Kotaku had a rumor about the new Playstation Home function (which has now been confirmed as true). They went to Sony to see if Sony had any comment. Sony asked them not to run the rumor. In fact, Sony even went so far as to say that if Kotaku posted the rumor, Kotaku would be blackballed ie no longer welcome at Sony events, would have to return their debug PS3 etc.

Kotaku went ahead with the story and clearly labelled it as a rumor. And true to their word, Sony blackballed Kotaku. When the masses found out, there was a (another) huge uproar of negative press for Sony. Enough such that Sony got back into contact with Kotaku and resolved their differences ie, Kotaku are no longer blackballed.

Now, I am aware that this kind of stuff happens all the time ie big corporations trying to force the press to say what the corporations want. After all, this is the job of the PR guy - trying to manage press about their company. In this regard, I understand why Sony tried to do what they did (don't agree with it but I do understand - personally, I think they should just have said no comment). However, it is the comments following this incident which really depresses me.

First off - imo Kotaku absolutely 100% did the right thing. Journalistic integrity is critical and if I ever find out that one of the news sources I read caved in to such demands from corporations - I would stop reading that news site - permanently. If I can't rely on the journalist, I can't rely on his news either.

However, if you read some of the comments - there seems to be a lot of people who believe that Kotaku did the wrong thing - that Kotaku should have caved into Sony and not printed the rumor. I just don't understand this. It seems to me that to not stand up for journalistic integrity in this case, is to basically say that news should be a form of advertising.

I don't know where these people are - but this utter lack of ethics and integrity is a very damning evidence of the state of society. As I said above - depressing.