On Oct. 6, Skydance — the entity that resulted from the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery — announced it would be adding new members to its board, including former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.

Kotick “paired bold strategic moves … with disciplined capital allocation and a consistent record of rewarding shareholders,” Skydance noted in a press release. The former executive “showed a rare ability to anticipate shifts in how consumers engage with entertainment, investing in new platforms, new business models and new ways of reaching fans while keeping creative excellence at the center of the enterprise.”

A bunch of video game and mainstream outlets covered the news. Some of them even alluded to the less-than-positive circumstances of Kotick’s departure from Activision: a massive lawsuit centering on allegations of widespread sexual misconduct and gender-based discrimination at the company, an internal revolt that culminated in a thousand-plus employee petition calling for Kotick’s ouster, and the contentious sale of Activision to Microsoft for nearly $70 billion. And at a glance, even fewer referenced the outcome of that lawsuit against Activision, a $54 million settlement that included the following text:

“No court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that: there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard; that Activision Blizzard senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic harassment, retaliation, or discrimination; or that Activision Blizzard’s Board of Directors, including its Chief Executive Officer, Robert Kotick, acted improperly with regard to the handling of any instances of workplace misconduct.”

This felt serendipitous. Just two weeks earlier, People Make Games published my investigation into Kotick’s campaign of threats against the media — particularly against outlets that resurfaced the allegations from that now-settled lawsuit or contemporaneous reporting about Kotick published by The Wall Street Journal. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if his legal apparatus spun back into motion in response to the latest set of unflattering stories.

Two weeks out, I’m blown away by the response to the investigation.¹ Perhaps the best feedback I’ve seen has been about the effort of it all: people saying they appreciated the money and sweat and time that People Make Games and I poured into the story, and that they had learned something about the sausage-making of journalism by watching.

It was reassuring as well to see social media posts from other journalists confirming that they too had received letters from Kotick’s representatives demanding changes to stuff they’d published. Stephen Totilo at Game File² even published a story about how he’d preempted Kotick’s concerns in a story he published and still received a letter from Clare Locke, the law firm representing the former CEO. My investigation listed a dozen or so outlets that we had identified as having received “feedback” from Clare Locke; from social media, I learned about a dozen more.

Which brings me to a piece of feedback — or more precisely, a genre of snarky comment — that I didn’t exactly love. One of the earliest comments on the PMG video was something to the effect of: “For every amazing reporter worthy of respect and appreciation, there's 50 industry shills making clickbait / ragebait articles.”

My video is, in no small part, about factual errors and un-journalistic overstatement published by some writers, as well as cowardice or poor judgment (often stemming from a lack of resources) on the part of editors, managers, and lawyers advising other publications faced with legal threats. One of the major examples in my story is that of GameSpot, which published a perfectly defensible (imo) article about Kotick that included an unfortunate factual error about the size of Activision’s settlement with a regulatory agency in California. From what we could tell, GameSpot, when faced with a nasty letter from Kotick’s lawyers, deleted its story instead of issuing a correction, paving the way for Kotick to cite GameSpot’s capitulation as evidence of the righteousness of his case in letters to other outlets.

This is bad. Were I in a position of authority at GameSpot I would have tried to resolve the situation differently. There are other examples in the video of me not entirely understanding — to put it generously — some of the decisions made by media companies in response to threats.

And yet, there are spots in the script where I pause to defend the media — because I believe it’s obviously worth defending. Here’s a snippet of the script from around the 39 minute mark:

“I’m not trying to scold here; I’m enormously sympathetic to anyone working in games media right now. Do not mistake me for a ‘video game journalists stink!’ type of guy. I really cannot overstate how much I like and support games media.”

At this stage in my career in journalism, I’ve developed a sort of naive professional solidarity that makes me really frustrated³ with imprecise media criticism. This may be an unpopular thing to say, but I think the media is good. I think the mainstream media is good. The enterprise of sharing information — some of which is exclusive and/or newsworthy (complicated investigations, breaking news, big and small scoops, reports from a place that is difficult for the ordinary reader to reach) and some of which is silly and maybe not all that important but still generally relevant enough that people tune in (a lot of contemporary video game coverage) — is good, and the vast majority of news content written and published by humans is unobjectionable⁴.

I have problems with specific journalists and editors and pundits, as well as specific editorial positions staked out by specific outlets. I cannot enumerate all of the broad societal and ideological issues with the contemporary press. There are too many. But I’m not really flattered when people say stuff like: Well, your investigation is “good” journalism, but everything else is inaccurate and/or clickbait. That’s not true!

There’s this idea in political science called Fenno’s Paradox that describes the trend of broad dissatisfaction with Congress as an institution — even as people generally like their own congressperson.⁵ (The New York Times recently quite memorably characterized a version of the phenomenon in a headline: The Party Is Too Extreme, Except My Candidate). Comments like the one I describe above fall into a similar category: The media I like and pay for is good, but the media in general is bad. Dwell on that! “Congress” is an institution that produces discrete outcomes that one can dislike relative to their congressperson. “The media,” however, is a hazy and fragmented concept, made up of prospective “good” journalists and outlets you haven’t yet encountered — some of whom may just lack the resources or support to pursue “good” journalism, and instead live out small-but-unrecognized positive change on the margins.

More to the point: I just don’t recognize any of the aforementioned “industry shills” among my peers.

In truth, my suspicion is that the vast majority of articles and news media people encounter is OK in an unremarkable way, in the sense that people don’t even recognize that they’ve engaged with the news at all. Conversely, people become hyperaware of “the media” when they encounter bad content, or when their attention is drawn to an example of supposed malfeasance in the media. (Lots of money and clicks in that.) I am a person with multiple print media subscriptions, so my conception of what the average ratio of “unremarkable” to “bad” articles people encounter is skewed. Still, I think the ratio probably skews heavily in the direction of “unremarkable.”

There are powerful interests and structural challenges bearing down on games journalists, as I detail in my investigation. False optimism and unearned praise won’t relieve those pressures. But even as an occasional critic, I think “the media is generally good, with XYZ exceptions…” is a more practical way to think about the world of news publishing than the alternative.

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