Two leading newspapers in the UK have today published editorials that are damning to video games. The Times and The Telegraph have published editorials by Giles Whitell and Jenny McCartney respectively.

The Times article is entitled ‘Video games: I’ll never buy one’ and The Telegraph runs with the lead ‘ There is a majority against vile video games, and it is moral.’ Both of these article are signs of a growing trend in the British media to portray video games as bad, evil and sociopath creating tools.

I will not quote the two papers, that has been done by plenty of other sites already. Rather I just want to take a moment to wonder, wonder when and why these leading British paper became so conservative and so willing to jump on the bandwagon of anti-gaming writing.

First off, The Times. It should be no surprise to see The Times publishing such editorial comments and news articles as we have seen over the past few months for one simple reason. Rupert Murdoch. The Times is owned by Murdoch, and so is that pinpoint of journalistic integrity, Fox News. If Fox News is able to get away with pushing their sensationalist crap, then it really should be no surprise that The Times is also being used to push Murdoch’s message against video games.

Secondly we have The Telegraph, a paper in which, according to a MORI Poll 60% of its readers vote for the Conservative Party. Again we should not be surprised to see articles such as the one today appearing. This is the kind of article their conservative readers will love to read.

My conclusions? Well from the evidence that is readily available regarding these two papers it is clear they have an agenda to push forward, an agenda that is targeted predominantly towards the conservative middle class in the UK and an agenda sanctioned by Rupert Murdoch.

As such us gaming commentators should not be expressing such outrage and shock at reading such articles in these papers, instead we should start to treat these articles as we treat the Fox News features on video games. With contempt.


This originally featured on my blog.