Kill yourself. No, I mean it. Fucking end your life. You infuriate me to no end and I'll elaborate why.
Such a fine, introductory sentence ruined by an ending that takes us on a well summarized but ultimately pointless trip to the past. It's to my understanding that you only have 500 words to make your point. That's a pathetic amount of space that we have to work with and capitalize on as much as possible.
Axe the first paragraph. Again, it's well summarized, but you can adequately explain the contemporary phenomenon of journalists forfeiting their own integrity without going this far back in time. You can do this because although the moral outrages of the past and the one we're facing now are similar, they're still two genetically different breeds of the same ancestral organism. I'll explain this in a minute.
The first part of the second paragraph is fine, just shorten it. You should really just refer to this as the "2014 Zoe Quinn controversy" and wrap up that entire clusterfuck in a nicely wrapped event name instead of laying out the events of the controversy itself. One, because it's a waste of words, and two, because as big as that was, it was only a symptom of the root problem that gaming's trade media has.
The first half of the third paragraph is garbage. Second half is fine.
Then we reach the last paragraph. This is where I have to tell you to throw yourself into a river with a brick tied around your faggot neck, especially for that last sentence.
The question is "Why are gamers so aggrieved with the media over the representation of the gaming community". What you should be focusing on with the 500 words you're allotted is this. The deliberately created an intractable conflict and divide between the community. The focus is intractable conflict. Gamers are dead was a symptom of this. Zoe Quinn was a symptom of this.
They took the very first fucking opportunity they could to make a controversy into a moral dichotomy, think this way and you're a misogynist, think THIS way and you're a decent person, unlike those fucking misogynists. All of it was done deliberately so they could forego the process of investigation, to stifle free discussion of the subject matter, and to justify publishing divisive and hostile articles about the community. Intractable conflict is the point in which a point of contention in an given issue, no matter how small or big, cannot be peacefully agreed or disagreed upon, and thus results in bitter conflict between two or more parties. Most issues we face in the realm of gaming are not so complex that such conflict can arise, do you realize that?
Do you realize that almost every instance of this kind of conflict arising in the industry, especially between the press and the common consumer, has been born out of pathos-driven, irrational, emotional appeal rather than a factual rebuttal to people's beliefs? This is how you purposely make discourse about any issue into intractable conflict, where it cannot be solved even if there's a clear right and wrong. If you're trying to defend your harlot of a friend, it's the perfect fucking way to report on the issue in such a manner that it leaves no room in the minds of anyone following this issue to hear and consider a viewpoint that runs opposite to the dominant narrative.
Doing what they did and the way they did it allowed them to fuck all of us over and not only feel justified in doing so, but actually look justified in the eyes of the fucking plebs, because it's an intractable conflict with a reinforced moral wrong and right. This is the core of the fucking issue with the media. This is how they allowed themselves to throw investigative integrity out the window, to skip out on asking questions, to say FUCK YOU to the people who read their shit, to get into obnoxious twitter fights with regular people and consumers who are mad about all of this, and to not only feel, but actually look justified when they shut down the evil nazi misogynists goobergaters, all of which, mind you, they also used as buzzwords to trigger emotional reactions that reinforces all of this bullshit.
We were the only people smart enough to fucking realize what was happening, and now we need to be smart enough to communicate this on paper. It's the slimiest, most manipulative way a journalist can build themselves a free pass on their own fucking jobs and integrity. They used this to smear members of the community, to dehumanize them, and set the stage for intractable, divisive conflict. If that isn't a betrayal of everything it means to be a journalist, of the responsibility of writing for the best known media outlets in the industry, then traps aren't gay either.
