Cooper Lawrence “regrets” Fox News Mass Effect remarks
The most recent controversy to sweep the Internets and infuriate gamers of all stripes is the recent feud between EA and the popular Fox News network (Electronic Arts is the company that owns Mass Effect developer Bioware).
The trouble all stems from a segment on the relatively new Fox News show “Live Desk With Martha MacCallum” (a weekly afternoon show) in which the game Mass Effect was mis-represented in the plethora of ways that only un-informed parents and non-interested media-types can do (not forgetting the politicians and Jack Thompson-like lawyers of course). The result was hysterical in it’s inaccuracies of the critically acclaimed Mass Effect RPG because the show chose to use the eye-catching label “Sexbox”, along with the caption “New Video Game Shows Full Digital Nudity and Sex”, in the opening of the segment. They then proceed to pour gasoline on the flames with their un-informed or flat-out wrong comments, both from the host as well as from the panel that they choose to discuss the issue after a short talk with two guests: Cooper Lawrence, a “psychologist, radio talk show host and author” and Geoff Keighly of SpikeTV fame, who tries to defend the game against the ignorant onslaught.
This whole business of course sent gamers into a frenzy and the whole thing blew up. EA then issued a statement responding to the “insulting Mass Effect inaccuracies”, while Fox News countered by saying that they tried to invite EA onto the program to discuss the game and the insulting segment, but that they hadn’t received any response. Gamers blasted the network and added to the whole “it’s cool to hate Fox News” shtick as well as spam-bombed Cooper’s Amazon-page for her newest book “The Cult of Perfection” with so many negative ratings, reviews and comments that Amazon locked it.
And now the drama continues, as Cooper Lawrence herself, who admitted to never even playing the game in the Live Desk segment, has stated in an interview with the New York Times that she regrets what she said on the Live Desk segment. In the interview she states that she watched someone play the game for about two and a half hours and said this: “I recognize that I misspoke. I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke. Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography. But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.”
Surprise, surprise lady, that’s what happens when you make comments without knowing what you are talking about, and that goes both for her as well as for the people working on the Live Desk show. Now it’ll be interesting to see if the whole thing dies down after this, but I’m not holding my breath. What I do know is that those who never watched Fox News before this have probably been soured to the whole network (even though Martha MacCALLUM is a lightweight on a new show) due to this debacle, and those that already watched the network amount this up to a very badly managed segment by a group of people that, like most folks in the mainstream media, could not care less about video games. But hey, since when do you go to the mainstream media for your gaming needs anyway? There’s much more important issues happening in the world, and that’s what I personally tune in to these stations for. — via Kotaku
