One of the saddest things to happen this year was a torrent of articles trying to run with the harassment narrative centered around former Nintendo representative, Alison Rapp. These articles actually created an atmosphere of misinformation and spawned an attack on Nintendo that the company had to weather like a coastal town during hurricane season. Well, that kind of misinformation did not go unnoticed, and everyone involved with the deluge of articles misrepresenting the situation have been logged and filed in the DeepFreeze database.
Bone Golem, the owner of DeepFreeze.it, made a post over on Kotaku in Action, highlighting that many new entries have been made in the ever-growing database that catalogs the unending growth of a digital organism known as media corruption.
The post is fairly lengthy, covering cronyism by Kirk Hamilton at Kotaku, Alec Meer from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and John Walker from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, as they promoted the game Volume, whose marketing was handled by Leigh Alexander’s Agency for Games, without disclosure.
The juicer bits are described later in the post under the Alison Rapp media blitz section, where five journalists are hit with a “Dishonesty” tab on their DeepFreeze profiles, including Jesse Singal from the New York Magazine, Alex Seedhouse from Nintendo Insider, Matthew Dunn from Australia’s News.com, Mike Rougeau the former editor from Playboy.com, and Patrick Klepek from Kotaku.
The two worst offenders were Klepek and Rougeau, who crafted rather elaborate narratives around Rapp and her firing, only for Nintendo to later reveal that the actual reason Rapp was fired was due to moonlighting at a second job that did not fit in line with the company’s policy.
Rougeau’s article was off base enough that he had to change certain parts and alter the headline. The original headline read “Today Nintendo Fired a Woman For Being Viciously Harassed” while the updated headline read “Today Nintendo Fired a Woman After Months of Vicious Harassment”.
The entire media blitz tried framing the firing of Alison Rapp on #GamerGate, attempting to tie it into the narrative of the consumer revolt driving women out of the tech industry, and it spawned a near-boycott of Nintendo based on that false narrative.
In reality, all of the attention and articles about Rapp well before her firing led KiwiFarms to dig into her history, upon which the community stumbled onto information that allegedly indicated that she was an escort in the Seattle, Washington area. Some people apparently notified Nintendo about the escort gig, which led Nintendo to firing Rapp, which was their only move since prostitution in the state of Washington is illegal.
You can check out all of the most recent updates on DeepFreeze.it to see what new entries have been added for game journalists and their transgressions in the realm of video game journalism.
