Matt Sullivan explains Gamedropping: How Journalism Outlets Reinforce a False Narrative Without Fact:
What does GamerGate have to do with traveling to Mars, Drake’s music, and George R.R. Martin?
You’d expect the answer to be nothing, because well, it shouldn’t have anything to do with any of those things. However over the past year we have seen many organizations, some of them Pulitzer Prize winning organizations, try desperately to make the claim that they are indeed linked.
We call this GameDropping.
GameDropping is a phenomenon wherein an author of an article mentions GamerGate even though the article contains nothing even remotely related to the movement. A few examples of this are The Guardian’s article “How can our future Mars colonies be free of sexism and racism?”, Pitchfork’s “It’s Time to Break Up With Drake”, and PC Magazine’s “George R.R. Martin: The Internet Is Toxic”.
Now one may think that GameDropping is rather harmless. Yes these articles have nothing to do with GamerGate, but the problem comes from the fact that when these articles reference GamerGate, there is either no source provided to what GamerGate actually is, or the source is a heavily biased opinion piece with little to no factual content.
In fact two of the above examples don’t reference sources at all, and the third references another article from the same publication which appears to be an interview wherein the author is interviewing themselves.
Now when readers of these publications read these stories, whether they be fans of Game of Thrones, or people critical of Drake, having no idea what GamerGate is, they now associate the name with something negative, having not been provided the facts, or a balanced article on exactly what the controversy is to make up their own minds. That information is conveniently left out, but the narrative is inserted.
The SJW’s first priority is always to push the Narrative.