Fox News contributor who bashed Xbox 360 hit now admits her wrongs
If you haven’t noticed, BLORGE has been out of commission for the past couple of days. Apparently Jonathan knocked his ginger ale on our master control board, and knocked out power to the entire Blorge network. And Luxembourg. Regardless, one of the big stories of the past week was Fox News appalling hatchet job on BioWare’s Mass Effect. Well, on Saturday author Cooper Lawrence recanted on her earlier statements about the game, saying that primetime television has more sexual innuendo than Mass Effect.
Last Week on Fox News’s “The Live Desk with Martha MacCallum”, author Cooper Lawrence was a guest to talk about the sexual content of Mass Effect. Her fellow interviewee for the segment was video game journalist, host of Spike TV’s GTtv and all-around good guy, Geoff Keighley. Throughout the entire segment, Keighley is drowned out and otherwise ignored by both MacCallum and Cooper, before the segment turns to a panel of “experts” who proceed to berate the game, question the competence of the ESRB, and equate it to “Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas”.
The brashness and audacity of these people, none of whom have played the game in question, enraged Electronic Arts (BioWare’s parent company) to the point where Jeff Brown, EA’s VP of Communications, wrote Fox News and demanded that they issue a contraction of the story, and an apology to the fast statements made in the interview. Fox News offered EA to come on their show, to which Fox News then said EA never responded to.
As the war of words continued, every website and television outlet had an opinion, and irate gamers stormed Amazon.com to rate down her book, many reviews stating “I have never read this but, but…”. Amazon is now deleting any reviews from people who “obviously have not read the book”.
Amazing that it took over 200 words to get us up to date, but here we are. In an interview with the New York Times, Lawrence recanted on her earlier views of the game. Her rationalization? She saw the game being played. Imagine that!
I recognize that I misspoke. I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke… Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography… But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.
Well, who would have guessed? You actually SEE the content that you’re demonizing the game for, and suddenly you’re not so angry about it? Naturally you can see how I would be a bit skeptical. In fact, my cynical side is going so far as to say that if the reaction hadn’t had been as universally negative as it was, this retraction would have never manifested itself in the first place. I would be willing to bet my entire month’s pay that if the press had been reversed, Ms. Lawrence would have milked this for every single penny that it was worth. No surprise really, as most of the mainstream media simply doesn’t get the internet.
The Fox News segment actually reminded me of an old segment by Fox 11 about the hacker group “Anonymous”. It’s the news segment that made the phrase “epic lulz” a household phrase. I’m starting to think that Fox News as a whole just doesn’t get the internet culture, and likes to use it to instill fear in their audience, which has an average age of 58.
Regardless of how or why, let us all be grateful that this may finally be coming to an end.
Related Posts:
4 Responses to “Fox News contributor who bashed Xbox 360 hit now admits her wrongs”
Leave a Reply:
You must be logged in to post a comment. Don't have an account? Register today!
January 27th, 2008
its not enough that she realises she misspoke. she needs to stop paroting and begin doing her own research. no matter what the form of media the research “someone told me it was this” is not good enough when you are going on a public debate.
no form of media should have to suffer this form of ingorant bashing. everything from her smug tone to the provocative image on the cover of her book and the prehistoric use of the word “darling” show how little she practices what she preaches. in debates like this people are genderless. using the word darling is sexisim and if it had been a man he would have gotten his own rash fox news segment
January 27th, 2008
I agree, she has not apologized.
What she is doing is attempting to do damage control.
Nowhere in her statement does she even take any sort of responsibility. Rather she says that she was misinformed and told things that weren’t true.
Well what about not having done any actual research?
Until she does makes a true and full apology I will be more than happy to see every shady denizen of the internet try and take her down any way they can, short of physical violence.
Oh and if you want to talk to her directly, she has a radio show that is on M-F from 7p-10p eastern and she can be reached at 877-6-cooper
January 28th, 2008
it’s Fox…what did you expect? they’re after the quick-scare for ratings. always has been (o’reilly) and apparently always will be… i’d love to see someone else at fox skewer the cooper they way they skew their enemies for misquotes and mistakes. then again, that would take courage. something Fox News never claimed to have.
January 28th, 2008
That is simply amazing. I had been waiting for Mass Effect to be released for months. I cannot believe they actually thought they would get away with blasting a game they obviously knew nothing about.
I agree it doesn’t sound as though she was apologizing.