Lazy coverage of Gamergate is only feeding this abusive campaign

For any traditional protest movement, a front-page story in America’s leading newspaper linking it with death threats, harassment and terror threats should be a death knell.

But this may not be the case for “#gamergate”, an online movement started in August as a harassment campaign against a little-known indie game developer which has now widened to include nearly all games industry feminists as its target.

Thanks to the unwavering ability of the campaign to wield the press as a weapon, even its appearance in the New York Times under the headline “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign” has managed to reinforce some of the group’s favoured talking-points.

The piece covers the terror threat against Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist academic famous for her web series “Tropes v Women in Video Games”.

Sarkeesian was forced to cancel a talk in Utah after an anonymous threat to perform a “Montreal Massacre style attack”, a reference to the 1989 tragedy in which gunman Marc Lépine shot 24 women and four men at the city’s École Polytechnique. When the venue refused to ban guns from the talk, citing Utah’s concealed carry laws, Sarkeesian pulled out.

The threat did not contain a reference to Gamergate, but many observers have drawn a link between the two. The language, decrying “women like Sarkeesian” who “want to punish us for even fantasising about being men”, could have been taken straight from a post on the discussion site 8Chan - a splinter from the better known 4Chan site and the rallying ground for the movement.

But alongside roundly condemning the threats, both those against Sarkeesian and against two other women, Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, who have been forced to leave their homes after their addresses were posted online alongside threats of violence, the New York Times piece also regurgitated Gamergate’s own explanations for its existence.

“The instigators of the campaign [against Sarkeesian]”, the Times’ Nick Wingfield writes, “are allied with a broader movement that has rallied around the Twitter hashtag #gamergate, a term adopted by those who see ethical problems among game journalists and political correctness in their coverage.”

In other words, the movement is focused on “ethical problems” in games journalism; the harassment which is endemic in gamergate is then blamed on “a much smaller faction”, one which the bulk of Gamergate is, to quote actor Adam Baldwin, the instigator of the hashtag, saying “this is not what we’re about”. The Gamergate line is that it vigorously self-polices, tracking down rogue elements within the movement who harass women, and telling them to stop.

On Vice and Vox, journalists concede that the movement has “interesting concerns”, or is trying to “serve as media watchdogs”. It’s a line which could – and does – come straight from Gamergate’s briefings, memefied and distributed to supporters across social media and forums. “Make the opposing force feel alone … use your numbers to surround the opposing figure. Explain that gamergate is not about social justice, but rather game journalism,” reads one post. “Operation: Shillgate”, aimed at spreading a tactic for “silencing” people criticising the movement, is another current directive.

But while the movement identifies itself as being about ethics in gaming journalism, its targets and its practices belie the truth. Amanda Marcotte, writing at Raw Story, says the group is the exact opposite: “#GamerGate should be understood primarily as a misogyny-fueled attack on ethics in journalism”.

Her list of reasons is extensive. Zoe Quinn, the first target of the movement, is not even a journalist. Sarkeesian, the second target, is “an exemplar of clean journalism”, taking money from reader donations, not industry advertising, to critically examine games from an independent perspective.

What’s more, the movement has succeeded in shutting down a research project on gender in gaming by flooding the survey with malicious responses. It has set fire to the wall between editorial and advertising at industry journal Gamasutra, where Intel was convinced to pull its advertising over a powerful editorial by the Guardian contributor Leigh Alexander.

“Overall, the pattern is clear,” writes Marcotte: “#gamergate opposes ethical journalism. They just claim the opposite, for the same reason conservatives say liberals are the ‘real’ racists and anti-choicers claim they want to ‘protect’ women and homophobes say they are trying to ‘protect traditional marriage’”.

Many discussions on the topic have opened by suggesting that the answer is somewhere in the middle, that there’s good points made on both sides, that the majority of gamergate is interested in ethical journalism. But none of that is true. Nick Davies would call this “false balance” – the flawed assumption that if there are two identifiable sides, conflicts between them must be presented as an equal debate.

Gamergate was described by Deadspin’s Kyle Wagner as “an assortment of agitators who sense which way the winds are blowing and feel left out”. But those agitators have been there for years; Sarkeesian was first targeted by a hate campaign in June 2012, before the first episode of Tropes v Women in Video Games was even produced.

What has changed is that the agitators have gone from being a toxic undercurrent, to a well-defined group. And in doing so, they’ve managed to play the media at its own game.

“It’s a neat trick,” says Wagner. “Agitate bare-facedly for the absolute necessity of developers investing the vast majority of their resources in games pitched at the intellectual and emotional level of a 16-year-old suburban masturbator, and no one beyond the gaming world is going to take you very seriously. But make it a story about an oppressive and hypocritical media conspiracy, and all of a sudden you have a cause, a side in a ‘debate’.”

That’s why it’s premature to call time of death on Gamergate. Like the Tea party, like climate deniers, the group will continue to thrive as long as it’s treated as a valid interlocutor in an important discussion. And as the coverage of Sarkeesian’s talk shows, even when slating them, that’s something the press can’t help but do.

• Feminist games critic cancels talk after terror threat