Seriously, "journalism", we need to talk. This is not okay.
The way the tiny pool of regurgitated baseless rumors regarding the next game in the GTA franchise (which, anyone that has been paying any attention would know, will either be a spin off or a standalone expansion) has been covered last year was pretty atrocious. A handful of websites, which don't even deal with videogames, writing and re-writing articles that have appeared on their counterparts and then cross-linking to them, was the status quo.
For six months straight, every week a "new" article would be posted about the exact same speculation regarding the protagonist or map or release date of GTA "6", even though the game does not officially even exist. If one were to follow the trail of links in one such article, it would not take long to get back to the starting point, and the links would always take you through the same websites. Someone who, at the end of the string, actually owns all these sites, is making a killing off a sensationalist circlejerk.
But never was it this low. Never before has online GTA related journalism reach as deep and dark a point as now. While until now, these sites were at least making minute attempts at hiding the fact that they just look up the most searched-for keywords (albeit poorly), they seemingly stopped giving a shit anymore.
You know there is something very, very wrong with journalism when you see an article speaking about how a nonexistent game will release five years from now on a nonexistent console (the best part is how most of these hack sites are on auto refresh just to artificially boost ad revenue...). The latest "rumors" are that GTA 6 will launch exclusively on something called the PlayStation 5 in 2020.
Someone actually wrote those lines.
And it was published.
Please.
Make it stop.
