I was in the same position until a few weeks ago. I'll try to explain what I have found.
At the core of gamergate is revelations that several professional and semi-professional web sites that provide coverage of video games had close relationships with game developers and game marketers. It was perceived that game companies and indie developers were using these relationships to influence the review at these sites, or to influence judges of various gaming awards. The allegations of favoritism or commercial influence constitute the "ethics in journalism" aspect of gamergate.
In my opinion, the existence of these relationships should have come as no surprise, but some people are naïve.
I have to say you are still quite uninformed, but I can hardly blame, especially if one has no particular interest in the issue. Thanks for the attempt though, wasn't as biased as some other accounts.
This came as no surprise to people that there's behind the scenes collusion and corruption. What kicked GG into gear was the coordinated 'gamers are dead' attack against gamers and gaming culture, silencing of discussion related to journalistic corruption and then very selectively only covering their chosen narrative. That's what sparked GG.
Now, I said this was "at the core" of gamergate, but that doesn't mean that these discussions of alleged ethical lapses are the focus of actual activity. In fact, most of the activity associated with gamergate has been discussions of feminist influence in the gaming industry. For example, the title of this thread came from the title of a news article.
Do you want to take a guess why? It's because the most prominent gamergate detractors are self-identified feminists and call gamergate as a coordinated attack on women and a hate movement - mind you, with absolutely zero evidence. And the media is giving them a megaphone.
If you have a guy punching you in the face and calling you a rapist for days and months, while you try to build a house, you eventually start to address him, ask him to explain himself and try to get him stop punching you. It's quite unfair then to be be asked 'why are you concentrating on this guy? Aren't you supposed to be building a house?'.
Let's take a step back for a moment for a reality check. Does it seem like the gaming industry has been torn apart?
Are you seriously taking Beritbart's clickbait headline as the actual argument?
Does it seem like the gaming industry would be a hotbed of feminism?
And where did that come from? Seems like two straw men in a row.
The alleged provision of sexual favors by female game developers to male writers was cited as unethical behavior.
*deep sigh*
Sure that's unethical behavior, but that wasn't what it was about, at all.
You're talking about Quinn and Grayson. Their relationship was confirmed. Grayson did not disclose the relationship when he covered Quinn's work. Subsequent discussion of this ethical misstep was censored, an attack on the entire gaming community commenced, the angle they took was that it's all about the women. Breitbart revealed private mailing list between journalists (GameJournoPros), more collusion, cronyism and nepotism was revealed. Media ignored the topic of it being corrupt (what a surprise) and concentrated on the victimization narrative.
To this day I've been asking people what do they mean when they say GG harassment, and they either have no answer, sheepishly point to one of those articles "but they said so" or show me some tweet by some random arse trolling someone. I'm not saying people haven't been harassed, I'm saying it's nothing like the media is portraying it to be. It's not gamergate supporters who are harassing, it's trolls who either happen to use gamergate hashtag to stir **** up or who, yes, genuinely happen to support gamergate. So while harassers can be gamergate supporters, it doesn't mean gamergate supporters are by default harassers. And this simple generalization fallacy seems to be always ignored. You don't judge the whole group by what select few do, especially when the whole group actively and aggressively condemns said behavior. In fact, we have seen no indication that this is anything other than business as usual on the internet, where public figures get death and rape threats and ******** argue with each other. What makes this extraordinary is the biased media coverage.
As word of these antics spread around the internet, an awful lot of people seemed to take it almost personally, and the women involved received a barrage of harassing and threatening emails, tweets, and other forms of hateful communications.
By an awful lot, you mean what exactly? Relative to your usual trolls? Hateful communication is received all the time by all genders, the only remarkable thing about GG is that the media chose to amplify the coverage those troll get, making more trolls to come out of the woodwork.
In other words, angered by what they perceived as unethical journalistic practices, an awful lot of people lashed out at the women involved in what was said to be unethical behavior.
I don't think the trolls care about unethical journalistic practices. Or did you mean criticism = lash out. Then yeah.
Well, that's my take on it anyway.
And it's a very uninformed take, sorry to say.