seanoff said:
Ghaleon, every single commercial news organisation on the planet has conflicts of interest. And by your standards, massive ones and every one of them has no integrity.
Car mags review cars and tyres and accessories and earn revenue from advertising those same things. Music mags, PC mags, i've seen video cards trashed in an article that has an ad for that very card in the middle of it.
Newspapers write stories on just about everything and take advertising from where ever they can. Newspapers even carry advertorials for things.
TV the same.
Now if you can prove that something is being positively spun due one of these relationships, a completely different matter and then their integrity is shot. But until then it's not really any different.
Taking advertising and providing journalistic coverage for the same company is nothing new, and I don't have issues with that. (Though some media sever that conflict altogether, such as Consumer Reports).
However, providing and supporting the company through additional services and products muddies the water. To run with you car magazine example, imagine if that car magazine started selling certain parts to a company to help make their cars, or provided some service to them to help with the manufacturing and distribution. Now there is a more direct conflict.
It is a fundamentally different relationship because they are directly contributing to the creation of the products they cover, rather than just providing ad space for them.
I don't like conspiracy theories and I am not trying to start any, but I do find there to be a deeper level of conflicting interests than the advertising that is customary in nearly all media with this relationship. Has it manifest in actual bias? I don't know. But it is something that certainly taints the IGN network in my opinion, because the potential for such bias, whether realized or not, is so much greater.