I know from personal experience that The Media are often a miserable failure when it comes to getting the story right, but this story that I read yesterday really upset me.
Last month, Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade had a fantastic idea: show the world that gamers are not the mindless idiots the Mainstream News would like to think we are, and help out some children at the same time. Thus spake Gabe:

“If you are like me, every time you see an article like this one – where the author claims that video games are training our nations youth to kill – you get angry. The media seems intent on perpetuating the myth that gamers are ticking time bombs just waiting to go off. I know for a fact that gamers are good people. I have had the opportunity on multiple occasions to meet hundreds of you at conventions all over the country. We are just regular people who happen to love video games.
With that in mind we have put together a little something we like to call “Child’s Play.” Penny Arcade is working with the Seattle Children’s Hospital and Amazon.com to make this Christmas really special for a lot of very sick kids. With the help of the Children’s Hospital we have created an Amazon Wish List for the kids. It’s full of video games, movies and toys. Some of these kids are in pretty bad shape and just having a Game Boy would really raise their spirits.”

Well, the Penny Arcade readers responded, and over $200,000 worth of toys and games were donated to the children’s hospital. Others who couldn’t or didn’t give toys, gave donations that totaled just over $27,000 dollars.
Think about that for a second. It’s a fairly big story, isn’t it? Those Gamers, the ones who play GTA: Vice City and want to come to your home to eat your children actually aren’t so bad after all. Those Gamers, who are planning the destruction of our American Way of Life when they get together for LAN parties are actually a caring and thoughful group of people. It kinda screws up the search-and-replace The Media have done on “Heavy Metal Music Listeners” or “Marilyn Manson Fans” for their shock-and-horror stories, doesn’t it?
A Google News search turns up three stories about the kindness and generosity of Penny Arcade and its readers.
Three.
The other story that seems to have captured The Media’s watchful eye returns 11,100 stories. Those are some great priorities, News Media.
Finally, let’s give Tycho the last word on their experience with The Media:

One hears a lot about media bias, quite a lot indeed, but the accepted formula goes like this:
the “Media,” capital M, an imaginary monolith with a supposedly synchronized perspective, is saying things that I disagree with. The things that I believe are right, therefore these factual distortions are the result of some lens – a bias which is deeply ingrained, like a vein of rich silver.
That’s all well and good, but let me propose the CFR Hypothesis, where CFR stands for “complete fucking retards.” Let’s see if you like it.
The first time the news dumbshits came out to talk about Child’s Play, though they were clearly told who was responsible for it they excised one of the people behind it. I consider this a fairly minor issue, but they’re still retarded. When they came to the Children’s Hospital itself for the toy delivery, there was no reporter even down there with us. A cameraman got some footage and then (I believe) ran away. I thought I heard him say “Ghosts!”, but that’s neither here nor there. When this footage was aired, I learned something new: that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That’s above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand. Here’s where the depression sets in.
What we – this is a grand We, which includes you – what we did was completely amazing. It was worth doing purely on account of its own virtues. But the other part, what we might call the “Secondary Objective,” was to promote the idea that we are not fucking murderers. This is an effort to combat media portrayals. Here’s the trick, the dark revelation, the Empire Strikes Back which produces our moment of darkness: we need to rely on that selfsame inept machinery to broadcast our new message as well. They’re simply not capable of it. I understand that there’s just no story in people being good to each other, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened from time to time.

Everyone who produces Penny Arcade, and everyone who reads Penny Arcade did an amazing, thoughtful, kind and compassionate act. They should be recognized for what they did, and that’s what I’m doing today.

Please read MORE for a Journalist’s response to this entry.