While reading an interview on the whole GamerGate disaster I noticed the following:
People started to wonder if those journalists were allowing their personal politics or maybe friendships affect what and who they were covering.
I can understand how friends affecting reviews might be a problem.
"Personal politics" is not as clear cut. As much as some people wish it wasn't that way, politics are a part of everything that's distributed between people who don't know each other personally (and politics also enter the spaces where all people know each other, but that's not important right now). Games are always involved with political topics.
I guess there are a lot of people who believe that politics shouldn't play into the evaluation of a game. I see that as a problem - if you ignore them they won't go away but instead they'll run rampant. Not discussing political problems will make them worse. So, in my eyes, a review of a game will have to cover the political side of that game.
At the same time a review is almost necessarily largely subjective. If it is not, it's probably not going to be read by as many people. That might not be a problem for a blogger who doesn't rely on revenue being generated by his writings, but it's definitely a problem for gaming magazines, so I think professional writers have quite significant incentive to write subjective pieces. Now this isn't as true for politics - opinionated articles on politics are probably bad for revenue (I don't really know), but it is probably really hard to write about the great graphical style and the awesome story with those dreadful game mechanics in a subjective tone and then switch to discussing improbable cleavage and marginalization of minorities more objectively.
So, when games journalists try to do the right thing (that is, accept their responsibility for what politics they promote together with the games they talk about) they aren't trained and experienced enough in writing about politics to not stir up a big controversy. Hence GamerGate'n'stuff.
Does that make any sense?
I know a lot of reefers. Most of them are also part of the left.
OCB is the most well know vendor for long papes around here, thus many of the smokers I know use those. The problem is, that there are rumors that OCB is supporting the "Front national", which is a French right-wing party. So, if you talk about how awesome OCB papers are then you may be supporting the right wing in France.
Now, most game studios are probably not sponsoring political parties (but I guess there are publishers who do), but nevertheless they do promote certain political views. Talking about that is important, as this kind of thing is a kind of free propaganda for certain political views. So, a reviewer needs to come to terms with the fact that he might be promoting propaganda for something which he doesn't want to promote. It's not like he can just ignore it and thus avoid spreading the propaganda - everyone who buys the game will be exposed to it.
At least there is a necessity to point out that this propaganda exists and which political views it might support, so consumers don't face it unprepared.