Well, I've got to say I've all but completely lost interest. At this point I'm just repeating myself or performing triage. It's not getting anywhere but further from my original point, and even when it does, it doesn't make a difference.

For instance: I agree it would've been better for AOL & Joystiq to pay for the hotel room during that MW3 event. And... so what? It doesn't change my perception of the site or the review in the slightest. I'm still going to differentiate between reviews, previews, dressed-up press releases, and objective reporting. I'm not going to mentally deduct a half-star based on the knowledge that the review is possibly tainted. And other readers aren't going to stop bitching about bias no matter how well they stick to their stated policy.

You can link to Joystiq's policy page and shout "j'accuse!", and you can hold up the Times's policy page as a beacon of integrity. It doesn't change the fact that sometimes the Times movie reviewer is going to go into a screening with a headache, just as sometimes a Joystiq reviewer is going to start up a game after getting sick of military first-person shooters.

Everything you list is an example of industry news. I've said from the start that there's a difference between investigative journalism, which demands objectivity; and writing about the arts, which defies objectivity. The idea driving my whole post in the first place is that it's bogus to act as if the same rules apply throughout. It's bogus to act as if an acknowledgement of that subjectivity invalidates a writer from being a "real" journalist. It's bogus to act as if any deviation from the standards of investigative journalism automatically invalidates arts writing, and it's bogus to act as if strict adherence to that has any kind of direct correlation to the quality of arts writing.

Supposedly, Pogue is fine getting food & drinks at a reception, as long as travel and airfare are out; but the Kotaku guys should never have been accepting free drinks in the first place, and Joystiq threw all of its integrity out the window by accepting accommodation for a writer and acknowledging it in the review. I don't really care about the inconsistency; I'm saying it's a meaningless distinction in the first place. It's not going to make me pay any more or less attention to Pogue's general audience pieces, and it's not going to improve or diminish my already low opinion of Gawker media sites. The policy's good to have, it's important to try to stick to it, and individual cases of adherence or infractions does jack shit compared to the overall respectability of a news source.

The reason it's an even bigger deal for games and gadgets than for movies is that there's still an insistence that underneath everything, they're products, and there's always a way to look at them completely analytically. That will probably never change for gadgets, and it frankly doesn't matter all that much. But it's deadly for games writing. It's what's created the ridiculous amount of attention paid to Metacritic scores, all the way to affecting hiring practices at studios. It's encouraged the behavior of sites that say "Hey, you should be more transparent! We're all friends here!" on the one hand, and then immediately turn and publish a link-baiting scandal at the first opportunity. Because they invariably wrap themselves in the cries of "free and independent press," and it fosters the idea that if you're not publishing dirt, you're not publishing the truth.

A film critic may get flak from a single review, but it's not going to change the long-term perception of him. A games journalist is constantly just a few percentage points away from being dismissed as a corporate shill. In that kind of environment, you don't get insightful analysis, and you sure as hell don't get objectivity. You get nothing of merit. Have you seen people running statistical analysis on Roger Ebert's reviews, trying to determine bias for or against individual studios? I never have. But I've seen it done pretty regularly for game sites.

When you said that Apple "manages" Gizmodo, all your examples suggest that you meant that Apple manages its own public relations with Gizmodo, just as it does with every publication. To which I have to respond, "Well, duh." What I inferred from "manages" was the notion that Apple's reprisals of Gizmodo resulted in the site being neutered into nothing more than an extension of Apple's marketing arm.

If that's not what you're saying, then I don't get what point you were making — is it supposed to be somehow less than honorable that a company tries to control its perception in the media and what information gets out? There's definitely an implication of that, with the recurring idea that there's something sinister behind Apple's secrecy. It's as if just because people want to know something, they deserve to know, and Apple's desire to protect their trade secrets is nothing more than muzzling the hard-working independent press.

And in case that sounds like an attempt to reduce a point to an absurd conclusion: to go back to the same well again, plenty of people, not just you, have tried to draw comparisons between the Foxconn story and the stolen iPhone prototype. "I'm not defending Gizmodo or anything, but whatever. Look! Look at what Apple did! They sent police to that guy's house!" (Even though they didn't; that's pretty much what the police do when someone reports a theft of something that valuable). I find it baffling that the same people who say it's "naive" to believe that companies are motivated by anything other than profit, will simultaneously act as if there's no such thing as corporate espionage.

For the bit about Apple's complicity in the Foxconn scandal itself: I'm wary of saying anything about their motivations, since with the way this conversation's going, it's either got to be that Apple was absolutely 100% blameless, or that Tim Cook was using a bellows to blow aluminum dust directly into the lungs of child workers, laughing maniacally the whole time. While discrediting Daisey didn't completely absolve Apple of blame, it does require everyone to reconsider the scope of the problems. Daisey's claim was that anyone would immediately see how bad the situation was, since he saw all of this going on in one plant over a period of about a week. Now that we know that the incidents were miles apart and months apart, do we keep assuming that the problems were so glaring and Apple desperately covered them up? Apple didn't directly manage these companies; they audited them. Should they have been more stringent, audited them more frequently, paid closer attention to violations? No question. From what I hear, that's the policy they've put into place. If an industrial accident occurs at a plant in the US, and it results in deaths, do we demand the plant be shut down, or improved? It sounds to me like it was more a case of negligence and denial than intentional, malicious cost-cutting. Of course, negligence and denial aren't to be dismissed. But a corporate giant blithely stomping on the backs of developing nations makes for a better story than a company that grossly underestimated the severity of a problem in its efforts to meet demand.

And speaking of that: While I appreciate the explanation of how corporations work, I think I get it. I chose the word "altruism" deliberately, but used it in the wrong turn of phrase. Everyone realizes that it's absurd to say that a for-profit company is working purely for the greater good. My point was that it's no less simplistic, and no more realistic, to talk as if a company is motivated completely by profit. And I don't think it's that much more realistic to take the Silkwood approach, either, and believe that it's always just a case of the well-intentioned and disregarded employee workin' against The Man.

Especially when Apple's in the picture. By all accounts, Jobs frequently pulled some assholish and underhanded maneuvers. By all accounts, he was a shrewd businessman. And while he still nominally had to answer to shareholders and to a board of directors, at least after the iPod, he was in a position to do basically whatever he wanted short of puppy slaughter. And to suggest that he was motivated solely by profit isn't being cynical, it's just patently false. A company motivated by profit looks like Samsung: a lot of well-made products, a few outstanding products, and year-to-year increase in share prices. It'd be ridiculous to stare in open-mouthed Spielbergian wonder at the "magical" iPad, but the fact remains that you don't get industry-changing and everyday-life-changing products if you're focused entirely on profit.

Another example: since you used a completely hypothetical example of a studio's financial troubles & media manipulation, I'll use my own completely hypothetical example of an imaginary multinational corporation that also runs theme parks. And as often as I may have been annoyed at the bureaucracy, directly affected by the politics, and disappointed by creative decisions made in the interest of cutting costs, you will never convince me that the primary motivation of that (imaginary) company is anything other than to make people happy. You could hypothetically go to one of these parks and see nothing but the ticket prices, the cost of concessions, and the number of souvenir shops; or you could acknowledge that they exist to allow the fantastic stuff to exist, not the other way around. I've seen plenty of message board posts and blogs from people who insist that the company's a business that exists for the purpose of making money. They think they're being realistic; I think they're being simple-minded. They complain that the company's overrun by the pencil-pushers running spreadsheets; I (hypothetically) spent a couple months dealing primarily with people running spreadsheets and checking numbers off clipboards — and over and over again, without exception, their justification was making guests happy and keeping them from having to wait.

So if all this is the result of my losing interest in the topic, you can see why I'm reluctant to drag it out farther away from gaming sites and into a larger discussion on how to finally fix journalism. Frankly, I think it's dissolved into nothing more than a disagreement over whether the glass is half empty or half full. I think it's important to remember that the point of that expression isn't to say one or the other was right; the point is that both are right.