Weekend Confirmed 136 - Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Forza Horizon

I've been listening to the show for quite a while now, but it took the discussion about video game "journalism" to actually get me to create an account and weigh in. I spent about 12 years working as a broadcast journalist before moving on to teach media and communication at the university level. While I am now in academia, I still have strong ties to the journalism profession.

That's the key word-- profession. Journalists are professionals, not merely in the sense that they do journalism for a living, but also that they have formed a broad community or culture that shares a set of ethical standards for conduct within the profession. Of course, there are exceptions and people on the fringe in any profession-- doctors, lawyers, plumbers, and yes, journalists-- but in general a profession has an agreed on set of standards and it polices itself.

Mainstream journalists-- those who work in newspapers, television, radio, and increasing online-- are not only concerned about conflicts of interest. They are also concerned about the *appearance* of a conflict of interest.

I could write on at great length about how mainstream journalists avoid such conflicts (or sometimes fail to do so), but let me simply emphasize the most important point: video games journalism, or whatever you want to call it, is a young profession. So young, in fact, that one may not be able to truly call it that, at least not yet. As a practice, it has not been institutionalized-- games journalists have not come together to create any sort of organization that can codify ethical behavior, at least not successfully. That would be a good first step.