I'm sure you all have heard the rumors flying around about a certain former employee of a certain company that specializes in video game/electronic reviews who was terminated for expressing his honest beliefs about a video game which didn't quite meet up to some tough standards and pissed off the company who made the game. Whether it's true or not isn't really the point of this piece, but rather to explore the issue of corrupted journalism. The role of journalists is to present a story with all the facts and the least amount of personal bias possible. This profession has a certain code of ethics and a big part of that is to not be bought out by a deep pocket corporation to skew the truth in favor for them. You don't go into journalism with the prospect of big money and majority of the time journalist feel that it is their duty to give the truth out to those who will listen. To open up eyes and fire up our hearts (and save us some money). Lets face it, the media as we know it now is definitely very biased and almost to the point of being state-runned, but there are still those out there who wish to be honest and do their job. Whether it's updating us on the conditions of our soldiers in combat or letting us know that this digital camera offers more bang for your buck than this other camera, it's all information that is important to us and we rely on honest journalist to give us those facts.

A lot of these game reviews, movie reviews and product reviews has saved me a lot of heartache and money. I don't necessarily follow all reviews, but the majority of them, that you can tell were honestly written, are usually very trustworthy. Now what happens when that trust is broken? You stop believing this reviewer and it ends up hurting you and them in the long run. This person thinks this product is great, but it could be the worst thing to hit this planet since the betamax or virutaboy. What's even worse is when a reviewer is influenced by some kind of kickback. These peoples words are dangerous because they carry so much weight. When people concider a certain reviewer honest and believe a good majority of what they say, that's a perfect target for a big corporation to try and sway that reviewer with large sums of money to promote their product no matter how shoddy it is. If the reviewer caves in, they lose their credibility, their employers lose their creditbility, and we lose our hard earned money and our respect we once had for them.

Once word gets out that this certain company was bought out or is influence by this big money corporation its reputation is tarnished forever. Everyone who has some stake in this company will now take their business elsewhere. When a company devoted to providing the best possible information to people like us about things we buy and consume loses it's sights on their original goal then they've lost the whole point on why they went into this business in the first place. I'm not saying that to help pay their employees and keep the company up and running that these people shouldn't use advertising spots to promote related products, what they shouldn't do is let those companies influence how they run things. If big bucks corporation doesn't like how they reviewed one of their games and threatens to cut off all their ads unless something is done, it's up to the reviewers to say "tough break" and let them withdraw. It's not like there aren't hundreds of other gaming companies that would loves some ad space to a website or magazine that millions of consumers visit everyday. Besides these corporations should know that, that's the name of the game. You have to expect poor sales if your game isn't up to par.

In the end It's about keeping your code of ethics and upholding your responsibilities as reviewers and journalists to give your readers the most truthful and beneficial information possible. Stop selling out your values because you didn't get into this job to have a mansion and six cars. If you wanted all that, become a surgeon. Us consumers rely on these people to save us from making a terrible mistake because lets face it, these reviewers are consumers too and they hate like everybody else to get shortchanged on some shoddy product and then they're left wishing there were some person out there who warned them not to buy it in the first place.