While the media continues to trip over themselves with misinformation about #GamerGate and its role in the gaming industry, the actual work by diggers and ethics enthusiasts continue to move forward by exposing media outlets who are not properly practicing ethics in media journalism.

Deep Freeze, the repository for bad behavior exhibited by video game journalists, was recently updated with a number of different entries for journalists from Kotaku, Paste Magazine, The Mary Sue and Polygon. It involves conflicts of interest centering around the journalists covering a game made by a close friend of theirs.

A thread over on Kotaku in Action by SixtyFours outlines five different cases involving a lack of disclosure from journalists for covering a game made by a close friend. The entries have been classified on the DeepFreeze.it database as “Cronyism”.

The entries center around promotion for a game made by indie developer Christine Love, who is close friends with a lot of the journalists at many large enthusiast media outlets.

This specific kind of cronyism isn’t new to video game journalism. There was also castigation passed down against certain video game outlets over promoting Gone Home, specifically Polygon, where one of the writers was good friends with the developers for quite some time and decided to give the game a sparkling review.

The issue of disclosure came up again in the infamous case involving Nathan Grayson and Zoe Quinn, when Grayson was romantically and financially involved with Quinn but opted not to disclose that to readers while writing about her projects multiple times, as outlined in his Deep Freeze profile.

Despite the media still using the tired old “#GamerGate is a harassment campaign”, #GamerGate funded projects like Deep Freeze have done nothing more than expose corruption in media journalism. What’s more is that the FBI and even a WAM!, peer reviewed report couldn’t find evidence to prove that #GamerGate was a harassment campaign.