In committing one of perhaps the most blatant instances of journalistic dishonesty in recent years, it appears that in publishing a piece running defense for Sweet Baby Inc., The Verge’s Ash Parrish chose to voluntarily omit the fact that the situation surrounding the company only garnered mainstream attention after one of its employees attempted to harass a critic because it would validate her opponent’s arguments.
Doing her part to reinforce the latest ‘gamers are evil’ narrative, Parrish took to The Verge on March 18th to publish a piece, The return of Gamergate is smaller and sadder, in which she attempted to provide readers with a very, very slanted recap of the current video game discourse.
How slanted, one may ask? Well, so much so that in recapping the very events that led-up to the Western video game industry circling their wagons around the narrative consultation company, Parrish failed to make any mention of the fact that the reason public sentiment has so harshly turned against them was because in response to the creation of a public Steam Curator List made to track which games they were openly credited as having worked on, Sweet Baby Inc. staff writer Chris Kindred called for his followers to try and get both it and its creator’s Steam account shut down by way of a mass false reporting campaign.
“The neo-Gamergate fervor surrounding Sweet Baby started with a Brazilian Steam user by the name of Kabrutu,” she falsely claimed, ignoring the fact that the page existed for months and received little attention prior to Kindred’s tantrum. “In January, he created the Steam curation page called ‘Sweet Baby Inc Detected’ (SBID), which, the page’s description explains, is ‘a tracker for games involved with Sweet Baby Inc.'”
“This lack of understanding about game development, whether intentional or not, belies the group’s true function,” Parrish added, “a convenient excuse for ‘anti-woke’ reactionary gamers to indulge in racist and misogynistic behavior that’s typically shunned in online communities.”
Unsurprisingly, when Parrish’s piece was read by Sweet Baby Inc.’s numerous critics, many were quick to realize that her piece had left out a very large, harassment-campaign-request-sized hole in its narrative.
However, their curiosity to this fact would soon be satisfied when Twitter user @YourReadThisWr1, who apparently spoke to Parrish regarding the discourse via the site’s Direct Message function, shared a number of messages in which the journalist attempted to explain to them her outlook on the entire affair.
Beginning their exchange with a justification for Kindred’s actions, Parrish opened, “I don’t agree that Kindred calling for the report of the steam list/kabrutus [the list’s creator] constitutes harassment.”
“Getting rid of that list was a discussion forum 100 pages of threads filled with terrible s–t, up to and including harassment,” she accused. “Getting rid of the list, gets rid of that forum. And you’ll see now, steam cut that s–t out – those forums are gone (or at least they were last time I checked) and the list is still there.”
Without a hint of irony, the journalist then declared, “I’m not gonna fault Kindred for trying and halfway succeeding at getting a vector for harassment shut down.”
Turning to the claims regarding her “omission of this ‘instigating incident’ from reporting,” Parrish next attempted to defend her lack of journalistic integrity by inviting @YourReadThisWr1 to “look at this event holistically taking everything into account.”
“Chris Kindred finds this list,” she asserted. “Asks folks to report the list and its maker. Reports are filed, and Steam acts only as far as to delete/lock the forum. The list still exists, Kabrutus’ account still exists. This is where this story should end, and all in all, that’s not really report worthy because it’s an interpersonal conflict that ends in a stalemate. Happens all the time.”
“But as we both know, the story doesn’t end there,” Parrish continued. “It continues and what resulted of that interpersonal outpouring of the grossest kinds of bigotry that blew up so big…well, you see.”
It was at this point in their exchange that Parrish proceeded to fully admit that her goal as a journalist was not truth, but propaganda, as she declared to @YourReadThisWR1, “This is the story. I get that in respect of thoroughness and completeness, not sharing that ‘Kindred started this’ is upsetting and feels like a lie of omission. But what does including it do? How does including that detail materially change the circumstances of the story? Let’s be honest and real here: not much.”
“Does what Kindred did with his tweet warrant the response he, his boss, his company, journalists, and sympatehtic developers received?,” Parrish inquired. “No. Not even close. Kindred said ‘Hey, this sucks, let’s take this shitty thing down and the guy who did it’ and the response was death threats [as of writing, Kindred has provided no public proof of his having received any supposed death threats]. And so you run into this thing where including this detail makes it seem like the inciting incident is on equal footing with what happened next and it’s so not. It’s so so so not.”
Moving to “share the conversation I had with my editors” about the notion of leaving out Kindred’s involvement, Parrish recalled, “Kabrutus and his ilk have a grievance against Sweet Baby Inc. that is rooted in racism and misogyny and has no basis in the reality of how video game development works,” the journalist posited. “That’s it. Period. And when you get into that nitty gritty of who did what when, (not obviously the whos and whats that are necessary to explaining the story) that central premise gets lost.”
“Me personally, I have to remember what my piece is ultimately about,” she continued her justification. “It’s not about providing a timeline of events, it’s bigger than that, it’s about explaining that the reason you’re hearing about this company called Sweet Baby Inc. and ‘Gamergate 2.0’ getting thrown around is because there’s a group of people who decided they hate ‘woke’ video games and found a convenient scapegoat to target and a larger conspiracy to underpin it.”
“With that big picture thesis, those smaller details (even the ones considered important to the players involved!!) become largely immaterial to the story,” she said.
“Kindreds tweets and his gloating, however bad or ill advised they may be, is not the fulcrum on which this story is made of broken,” she further asserted.
Drawing her personal justification for her omission to a close – which, it should be explicitly noted, is made even more disingenuous by the fact that such a defense would never fly with her ideological allies in a situation where the roles were reversed – the journalist ultimately told @YourReadThisWR1, “I understand why you don’t see it that way, why others have the anger that they do about it. I’d urge you to think about it this way: This story (mine, Kotaku’s, everybody else’s) really honestly isn’t even about Sweet Baby Inc. It’s not about defend them or protecting them specifically. It’s bigger than that.”
“It’s about explaining to readers that ‘There’s a group of people trying to fight another culture war within the video game space just like 10 years ago, and they’re using the same language and playbook targeting the same kinds of people,” she argued. “But fundamentally, this movement isn’t gonna have the same outcome it did last time. These culture warriors are like Don Quixotes and have picked a fight they’ve already lost. Here’s why.'”
“That’s the story,” she ultimately concluded. “That’s really the *only* story here.”
As of writing, Parrish has yet to publicly respond to the messages leaked by @YourReadThisWR1.
However, since their reveal, she has locked her personal Twitter account.
NEXT: Mainstream Press, Video Game Devs Come Out In Full Force To Run Defense For Sweet Baby Inc.