The issue of how video games affect people’s understanding of the world has been raised over and over again.  Dr. Carole Lieberman was interviewed by Fox News about violence and sexual situations in games.  Dr. Lieberman has been active in evaluating the effect of exposure to violence in the media on children for many years and is considered by many to be an expert in the field.  So when Fox News asked her about the violence and sexual situations in Bulletstorm she gave them her honest opinion.

Dr. Lieberman said:

• “Video games have increasingly, and more brazenly, connected sex and violence in images, actions and words.”
• “This has the psychological impact of doubling the excitement, stimulation and incitement to copycat acts.”
• “The increase in rapes can be attributed, in large part, to the playing out of such scenes in video games.”

And Fox News twisted this into “sexual situations and acts in video games — highlighted so well in Bulletstorm — have led to real-world sexual violence. ”

And journalist with even the slightest sense of integrity can see what happened here.  Fox News wanted a juicy story to drive page views.  Dr. Lieberman told me that she asked them to correct this perversion of her words and they outright refused.  Of course, I see this as backing up my statement that they weren’t after “the truth” and instead just wanted to fan the flames of controversy.

And fan the flames of controversy they did.  Dr. Lieberman has received hundreds of threatening emails from gamers and has had her recent book Bad Girls: Why Men Love Them and How Good Girls Can Learn Their Secrets been Amazon bombed.  For those of you who don’t know, Amazon bombing is a phenomenon where trolls who have nothing better to do post negative and non-truthful reviews of a product.  In this case, you get Fox News creating a problem and a bunch of people overreacting to an inaccurate quote by attacking Dr. Lieberman.

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