This weekend, IGN posted a call-to-action for its readers to donate to Palestinian charities and humanitarian organizations. The move mirrored similar calls-to-action the site has made during major events in the world, like this Black Lives Matter post (last updated in late April, 2021). After just over 24 hours, the post was taken down. No explanation was given. (A mirror of the post is here, and you can find the original archive at the Wayback Machine.)
Commentators speculated that the post had been removed from the site after pressure from right-wing trolls, or a conflict with the Israeli IGN franchise, or a preponderance of Gamers doing what Gamers love to do whenever Politics gets into their Mindless Consumption, or the ever-present, always-vague “advertiser concerns.”
What nobody could see coming was that at 1 AM CST, literally the middle of the night, IGN tweeted a photo containing the following text, quoted in its entirety so as not to exclude any context:
Across IGN, our hearts are heavy as we follow the events in Israel, Palestine and across the region. Our first thought is always for the broader IGN community – our employees, readers, and partners – and our hopes for their safety and well-being.
We have a track record of supporting humanitarian efforts and charities across the globe. In the instance of our recent post regarding how to help civilians in the Israel-Palestinian Conflict, our philanthropic instincts to help those in need was not in-line with our intent of trying to show support for all people impacted by tragic events. By highlighting only one population, the post mistakenly left the impression that we were politically aligned with one side. That was not our intention and we sincerely regret the error.
We do intend to continue to use our platforms and resources to aid those civilian lives impacted across the entire area. As part of this effort, we have made a donation of $25,000 to Save The Children, an organization that works to support children everywhere and provides emergency aid in natural disasters, war and other conflicts.
Thank you for your support and for always engaging with us. Our community is a huge part of what makes IGN special. We will continue to follow global events and look for ways to lend our support in productive, helpful ways.
Some IGN Corporate stooge at 1 AM, really legitimately tweeting “All Lives Matter” and giving $25,000 to fucking Save The Children lmao
This text is obviously ridiculous and, if this tweet by IGN’s executive editor of tech, Bo Moore, is any indication, not supported by the editorial team. The original post was simple, written in clear language; this one is intentionally obfuscatory and pretends there’s a larger problem “in the region” than Israel bombing the shit out of Gaza, displacing tens of thousands of people and killing hundreds more, and even destroying the Gaza Bureaus of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera on spurious grounds that Hamas was holed up in their building.
The original post did not, in fact, claim to “pick sides” – as if a fucking video game website could actually have any influence on a 73-year-old conflict. It simply stated a fact – that Palestinians in Gaza are overwhelmingly who is being harmed in this latest round of fighting – and provided links to organizations that work directly in the area. In fact, while it was remarkable that IGN made a statement like this at all (and got GameInformer to follow suit later), some critics noted that the post did not, in fact, go far enough in its support of Palestinians.
But instead of a flawed, kind of middling post that at least provided readers in the Gamer Milieu with some concrete ways to help Palestinians out, we get… whatever the fuck this new thing is. A post that ultimately washes its hands of responsibility, that says, laughing nervously, “well when you really think about it, aren’t ALL kids suffering in some fashion?” This mockery, this flouting of even the barest minimum editorial freedom imaginable, is also immensely troubling.
Nobody is denying that the contours of the Israel-Palestine Conflict are complicated. It’s a 73-year fight that not a single negotiator has been able to reconcile. You’re not going to get the master diplomatic stroke that fixes everything from video game websites – not IGN and certainly not No Escape. But within the frame of acceptable debate, you have to ask why the fuck a simple post about Palestinian aid groups is apparently so far beyond the pale that IGN Corporate goes over the heads of the whole editorial staff and removes it.
I’ve got… several choice words about this whole situation. I just keep thinking about how Israel is an extremely powerful US client state with nuclear weapons and it’s acting like a high school bully whose dad is on the school board or a cop with connections who regularly domestic-abuses his wife. I’m also thinking about how no allegory or metaphor can really encompass how extensively Israel has engaged in Palestinian dehumanization, especially recently. But this isn’t really where I want to unpack those thoughts. Instead, we’ve got to deal with this embarrassing bullshit some C-suite video game media executive dictated to some shit-eating corporate PR intern that’s going to make it nigh impossible to even talk about Palestine sympathetically. And on top of that, it has created a problem for a nascent free and independent video game press that will have consequences down the line.
Ultimately we still don’t know what combination of fuckshit led to IGN’s removal of their original statement, but we do know what kind of fuckshit it’s going to inspire. This was an unprecedented corporate overreach into the editorial realm, and without significant pushback from the audience it’s going to become acceptable for holding companies and publishers and whatnot to pull this kind of nonsense any time they think a statement is just a lil too spicy for their advertisers to handle.
And like, okay, let’s pause for a second. We are in fact talking about video game journalism. Yes, I am aware how hostile the audience tends to be toward attempts at legit criticism and journalism involving scary topics like politics, and how little corporations give a shit about the health of the games-oriented outlets they own. That’s what makes adhering to the universal standard of an independent newsroom so important – that way it doesn’t matter what corporate interests say or how many pearls advertisers clutch.
This isn’t to say newsrooms shouldn’t be transparent or shouldn’t take in public feedback – journalism isn’t perfect, and it hurts real people sometimes. But where you don’t cede ground is on the ability to say “What’s happening here is not right. Here are some ways you can help.”
Anyway, that’s why I posted the mirror of IGN’s original statement. I believe it should be read as widely as possible, even though it is pretty brief and even if it isn’t particularly “radical” enough for my tastes or whatever. And I think you should share it – or the direct Wayback Machine archive – as often as possible, certainly for this week if not beyond. They don’t get to pull this shit quietly.
Further reading: Imran Khan at Fanbyte, “IGN’s Parent Company Overstepping Damages All Journalism”