The Washington Post's Attack on the Gaming Industry Is Proof That Its Days as a News Outlet Are Far Behind It

(AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu, File)

At the end of 2014, a video game journalist by the name of Nathan Grayson wrote for the gaming news website Kotaku. One day, it came to light that Grayson was in a relationship with a game developer named Zoe Quinn, and he was giving good reviews to Quinn’s game without disclosing this relationship. The gaming community naturally did not like the fact they were getting unethical journalism surrounding the gaming industry and demanded that these gaming news sites do better.

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In response, the now-social justice soaked gaming websites published articles about how the gaming community was over and that they were no longer a thing, and that developers and journalists didn’t need to answer or pay attention to them anymore.

These were just the beginning moments of a very long and very involved socio-political war called “GamerGate,” and all the events, players, and changes that occurred during this time would take an entire book to detail. What I can say for certain is that it was the first major setback for the social justice blitzkrieg of our culture and the hard left’s first major loss in the modern culture war. To this day, you’ll still find leftists complaining about it and attempting to repaint it as something it wasn’t.

(READ: The New York Times Is Trying to Redefine #GamerGate, but Here’s the Real Story)

Kotaku and other sites that had fallen into what would be later called “woke culture” weren’t the only news sites that had taken a dark turn. Mainstream media outlets had been hard leftist for some time, and as a result, they were more apt to spread propaganda and lies just as much as their gaming site counterparts.

Fast forward to today and mainstream media outlets have embraced woke culture to the point of being enforcement arms of the left. CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC, NBC, etc. have been caught more times than you can probably remember spreading actual misinformation. CNN was one of the worst offenders and was highly unapologetic for it.

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The Washington Post, like CNN, is one of the worst offenders out there. RedState has an extensive library of articles detailing the egregious lies, hypocrisy, and straight-up stupid takes from the site. And why shouldn’t it? The post features some of the absolute worst examples of journalism and journalists, such as Taylor Lorenz and “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler, both of whom are repeatedly called out for their ridiculous reporting.

So it should surprise no one that Kotaku’s Grayson is now the Washington Post’s Grayson.

As RedState reported on Thursday, Grayson released an article effectively bragging that he called up 20 video game companies and asked them what they were going to do in light of this threat against Roe v Wade that arose when a draft decision was leaked from the Supreme Court.

Grayson complained that despite abortion being back in the spotlight as a social topic, gaming companies, responsible for creating video games, had been largely silent on the abortion issue. He noted that previously, gaming companies were donating to political movements like BLM and wondered where that support was for this issue.

My colleague, Jeff Charles, put it well when he described what Grayson and the Washington Post were actually doing:

This is nothing more than the Washington Post, one of the most prominent legacy activist media outlets in America, trying to pressure companies into falling in line on the abortion issue. They are serving as a sort of enforcer for the woke mob. Their objective is clear: Compel these corporations into supporting abortion by shaming, bullying, or coercing them to get with the program.

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WaPo is using Grayson as an enforcer to effectively hold the gun of public opinion against the heads of video game companies, compelling them to not only support their cause with words but fund various activist groups and politicians. This makes WaPo something of a hard-left mafia enforcer who comes into your establishment and comments that you’ve got a nice place and it would be a shame if someone came in and ruined it.

Pay up and swear loyalty, and maybe nothing bad will happen.

It’s pure intimidation. There’s little journalism here.

Video game companies are there to make video games. They are not there to be toadies for a political party or movement. Getting involved in politics is the last thing that they, or any company for that matter, should want to do. It very, very rarely ever works out for them. In fact, the most common pattern of a company going woke is going broke.

It’s in any company’s best interest to ignore someone like Grayson and send no reply.

But more importantly, it’s in our best interest to understand something very clearly about the Washington Post.

It has proven time and again, and more and more recently, that it is not a news organization. It may produce news stories here and there, but that that is now its secondary, if not its tertiary purpose, like a gumball machine at a Planned Parenthood.

This is an activist organization posing as a news organization. It is not there to deliver you the truth, it is there to sell you a narrative. It is not there to serve the public, it is there to serve an agenda. Everything that comes out of its offices, be it from Lorenz, Kessler, Grayson, etc. should be initially disbelieved until it is scrutinized and investigated by everyone from the general public to its journalistic betters.

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WaPo now reminds me of Kotaku, a shadow of what it once was, and no longer worth paying attention to.

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