“Over the last year alone, Gordon Brown and his cronies have added an extra £37,000 to our lifetime tax bill, says the TaxPayers’ Alliance.”

The number one rule of journalism – or writing of any kind – is rope your readers in with the first paragraph. This week’s Zechs Files is indebted to that paragon of journalistic integrity, The Daily Star, for its introduction.

Bias, ladies and gentlemen, is rife. Frankly, the use of the word ‘cronies’ is rather lightweight by comparison to the usual Daily Star standard but it gets the point across: newspapers are not impartial.

One thing I get sick of reading in the comments of every other column is lazy accusations of bias. Ignoring the fact that most of them are incorrect, they rather miss the point. Print news is biased. It just is. There is no getting away from it.

Boring

But is that really such a bad thing? Impartiality would be wonderful in an ideal world but it would be rather boring, wouldn’t it? Columns like this would disappear (I know, I know, I walked into that one) and we would be left with only the simplest of newsposts.

Take this story for example. It could easily have been made shorter, less opinionated and, in retrospect, it probably should have been. However, writing fulfils more roles in our lives than merely telling us what is going on.

The job of an article writer and especially a columnist, is to entertain you, the reader. Imagine a completely impartial version of this column, for instance. It's almost impossible. Columns are entirely personal - even moreso than an article, which at least requires some level of research and/or evidence to back-up the opinions. Note, though, that even a well researched article will express opinions.

Responsibility

Of course, there is a level of responsibility that comes with any public position, but there a couple of things to bear in mind. Firstly, keeping something strictly impartial is rather difficult. Going back to the DotA piece, even the introduction offers an opinion: “noticeably absent is staple esport favourite, Warcraft III.” It seems innocent enough, but if you want to get really nit-picky ‘favourite’ is very much a matter of opinion.

Secondly, very, very few esports writers are paid for what they do. One of the few perks of the “job” (and I use the term loosely) is being able to give your own opinions a public voice. Excuse or reason? I’ll let you decide, but the fact remains that impartiality is much easier to achieve when writers are practically paid to shut up. [1]

See-through

Even if I haven’t managed to convince you that a small amount of bias is favourable then surely you have to admit that it’s not so bad if you know where we stand. Of course SK is going to write favourably about SK players, just like any other clan site you care to name. You expect it, just like a Daily Star reader expects its political commentators to support The Conservatives. It’s all about one of evan’s favourite words: transparency.

You don’t go to GotForums expecting them to slate MLG (although employing CGS staff members to write about the league’s competitors is a different matter altogether) and you don’t go to MYM expecting them to say ‘Grubby got owned’.

If you want to simplify this column absolutely, I suppose my main point is that no, gaming sites are not impartial, but that it’s okay if you know it in the first place. And as a footnote, the so-called bias is what makes sites like SK and MYM so interesting.

Another important thing to note is that, given the way esports works, 'exclusives' are incredibly rare. Most of our news comes from press releases or other websites. If there were no opinion pieces then every esports site would be identical, give or take a few adjectives.

Don't believe me? Why do you think GotForums gets most of its hits from its forums? Because they have so little comment content. By comparison, the forums on SK are less active but our columns bring in a lot of hits precisely because of the fact that they offer comment and opinion, not despite it.

[1]The word ‘practically’ is very important here!