As I’m sure you’ve noticed, CheapAssGamer.com is under attack right now for running an impromptu contest on their podcast promoting their members to create rumors and see if it gets picked up by one of the major gaming blogs: Kotaku, Joystiq or Destructoid. Well it turns out that one of their members was extremely successful and created a fake rumor about Microsoft rebranding their line of Xboxes that hit the front page of almost every gaming blog and two out of the three big ones.

After it was discovered that it was a fake rumor, there has been a major backlash against CAG which involved most of the gaming sites to update their original articles with snarling updates like this one from Brian Crecente at Kotaku:

UPDATE: It appears that this rumor story could be CAG throwing their credibility out the window as part of a contest. Kotaku’s decision to run rumors is always based on the credibility of the site and the information contained within it. In the past CAG has proven to be a reliable site, having broken a number of stories through apt reporting. It appears that may no longer be the case.

These vicious attacks on CAG forced CheapyD to write an article trying to explain the situation. Since most of you probably don’t feel like reading it, I’ll just go ahead and quote the important paragraph:

I feel it’s important to note that this story originated from one of our users’ personal blogs and was not promoted in anyway by the CAG staff. We did not submit it to any sites as news and it did not appear on the CAG front page where a big story like this would wind up if I was certain of its truthfulness. I’m proud to say that in the 5+ years that I’ve run CAG, I’ve never posted a false rumor on our front page. I’m not trying trying to blow my own horn here, just letting you know where I stand on posting rumors on my own site. We’re in a different business than a typical gaming blog and highlighting rumors on our front page would be confusing to our readers. Oh, and in case you were wondering, although a huge number of sites posted the story, none of them bothered to contact myself or the story’s author to check on it’s validity.

Now to Doc, Lono and others, this may sound like CheapyD trying to place all the blame on the community member, but I interpreted it as CheapyD defending his site because all of the major gaming sites being too stupid to realize that their source of information was a personal blog inside a gaming blog. This would be like a child telling a news reporter that dragons are real and then the parents getting sued when the news channel finds out they aren’t.

What’s next? Are Kotaku and Destructoid going to start taking rumors from Myspace and Facebook? We went through this same freakin’ debacle a couple weeks ago when all the major gaming sites took a user post from VGChartz about Microsoft having a huge relaunching event on G4 for the new Xbox Experience, which of course turned out to be false because the source was just a lowly forum poster on a gaming site.

Enough is enough! If these major gaming blogs want to keep their reputation as journalists then I highly suggest they start doing some research and credential checking before they go posting every single news tip that gets sent their way just so they can be the first one to break the story and get those oh so precious page views. And if you don’t feel like changing your ways then you’d better be willing to admit that the source you took it from was far from reliable instead of posting some pompous and snarky update trashing the site you got it from. If you don’t want to get burned then you shouldn’t be playing with fire. Stop posting every single rumor that comes your way and actually do some journalistic analysis before throwing it on the front page of your site that tens of thousands of people visit.

At least if you get punked, don’t be an ass about it. Actually learn from your mistake and try to not let it happen again.

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