Straight up now, tell me Mxy, do you personally believe that there was no collaborative effort to socially engineer gaming demographics using multiple news outlets to broadcast the same fucking message? Frankly, I'm more interested in knowing your position on that than I am with launching an inquisition on Cracked, which is already known to be simpatico with the Sarkeesian ilk anyway.
No, I don't think there's an organized effort, I think there's lazy "journalism" and there's reading too much into it. At Cracked we do a series about bullshit stories that go viral (most of which could have been debunked by 2 minutes on Google) and I've edited some of those articles. Before working on that, I never realized how much Gawker and sites like that copy from each other; a site will grab a story from Reddit or whatever, another will slightly reword it, another will reword that one, and so on. By the end of the week you'll have 10 sites doing the same story, none of which went through the trouble of double-checking the sources. And that's how you end up seeing your aunt sharing a fake article about bigfoot on Facebook.
The same thing happens with opinion pieces. One site writes about an issue and another "reports" it by pasting some quotes and adding five paragraphs of "on the one hand..." and rhetorical questions (1000-word articles pay more than 500-word articles). It's barely journalism. That's very clearly what happened with the "gamers are dead" articles I've seen cited as the entire impetus for Gamergate, despite the fact that they came out after the movement started. Again, if people wanna start an anti-"SJW" movement I think that's perfectly fine, but just fucking say "we don't like the influence of progressives in our culture" or whatever. Don't try to make a conspiracy out of it. That's a fantastic way to ensure only nutjobs take the movement seriously. Especially when you're planning sockpuppet campaigns in public chatrooms and silly shit like that.
As for the nerd sites mailing list, I hope I'm not fueling more conspiracies by revealing there's a private Facebook group for dick joke site writers, too. We talk about how to file our taxes, laugh at idiots attacking Cracked, etc. It's mainly for Cracked writers but lots of them write for other sites too so, you know, collusion!
