[tptacek]

I'm going to go with "because the loudest people who chose to adopt the label 'GamerGate' also managed to spoil the word 'ethics', so that in discussions of interest to 'GamerGaters', readers have to be cautious about whether there are actual ethical concerns, rather than fig leaves used to promote misogyny."

Whatever you might think of the issues "GamerGate" advocates for, another indisputable fact is that its troll faction very definitely turned the words "ethics in journalism" into a punch line. So much so that simply saying the words "ethics in journalism" is very effective code for "this is really about misogyny".

[brymaster]

This is disappointing because I think you're smarter than this.

A running joke, "ethics in journalism", by detractors and the very same "journalists" being criticized for ethical transgressions is not effective for anything, besides perpetuating the "this is really about misogyny" meme.

If one is "cautious", one can certainly do their due diligence to investigate this matter and learn that reporting on games, tech and all sorts of other journalism really are cause for ethical concerns.

I'm aware you don't care about games or game reportage, but I'll cite a few examples anyway: take corrupt "journalists", such as Nathan Grayson (http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson) or Jenn Frank (http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=jenn_frank) who collude, fail to disclose relationships and give favorable coverage and reviews to friends.

By the way, trolls and shit-stirrers are not the "loudest people" nor do they represent a label. No amount of Twitter reweets, likes and favorites will make that a reasonable argument.