Jay Ricciardi · @ThatJayR
21st Aug 2014 from TwitLonger
The reason there is no news coverage of the Zoe Quinnsiracy allegations:
I've been trying to write an article about the Zoe Quinnspiracy, but haven't been able to. I've written drafts of several articles, all trying to investigate the situation from different angles, trying to dissect all the information and put it into one place. I've put in an enormous amount of research. But, I'm deleting them all because, essentially, there is nothing to report on.
That's the truth. Sorry.
The reason there is no media coverage of this situation is that there is no story. The further you dig, the further to tumble down the rabbit hole, the less there is. The more you research and investigate everything, backwards and forwards, the more you realize that everything is pure allegation.
One draft had the words "allegation" and "alleged" more than the word "the."
This is a messy personal life situation that has been torn out of private correspondence and thrust into the public sphere of discussion because someone had a personal axe to grind with a fairly well known indie game developer. Most of the dispute and hot air seems to have stemmed from an admitted typo in the ex's blog. I mean, seriously, how is that news? Why would anyone cover that? Picture the headlines:
"Typo Causes Wild Allegations of Nepotism!"
"Misconstrued Personal Life Drama Causes Gamers to Ignore Gaming!"
"Typo Causes Gamers to Care About Who Slept With Who!"
It's all ridiculous. I could imagine those headlines to coming from a satire site, not a news outlet.
The best I could come up with is basically just a lengthy discussion and description of legal terms like slander, libel, and criminal defamation. But I don't need to publish an article about that, I can just link to a Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation).
In this case, an article is not the appropriate place to talk about this situation. Publishing to a news outlet gives too much credit to a situation driven by conjecture, allegation, misinformation, and extrapolation. In my own work, I am a big advocate for the ethics of "the Medium is the Message." Now, if allegations of nepotism turn out to be true, then there will be a story. If allegations of DMCA abuse are proven to be true, then there will be a story.
However, until these things are proven with legitimate evidence (proven to be undoctored): there is nothing but scandal to report on and there is no use publishing any sort of tabloid-fodder posts that might throw wood onto a fire that is slowly realizing it is fueled by nothing.
The only thing of note, that I can think of to mention, is that Kotaku Editor in Chief, Stephen Totilo has made an official statement that confirms: internal investigation shows that the allegations against Kotaku have no legs to stand on. (Link: http://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-times-about-a-pos-1624707346/all). Kotaku, as a publication, has more to lose here as a company than anyone else does individually; they would be first in line to be as critical of allegations of nepotism and corruption as possible.