>>521
Even if she doesn't knows any of the devs for whom she felt pity, what she did is still a gross ethical violation. Allow me to explain what I mean.
In the way I understand the term "conflict of interests", personal relationships between journalists and the people they write about aren't conflicts of interests per se. Rather, personal relationships are situations which significantly increase the likelihood of a conflict occuring between the journalist's interest to help his friend/lover/relativeinterest and his interest to properly inform his readers about what he writes.
The reason why journalists should try to avoid writing about people with whom they have personal relationships (and provide disclosure when writing about such people) is not because it is bound to guarantee biased coverage, but rather because it significantly increases the likelihood (but probably not to the point of certainty) of biased coverage.
There could have been cases in which a journalist had a personal relationship with a subject of one of his article and yet did not feel any desire to help that person in a way that conflicted with his professional duty to write in an objective, imaprtial and informative manner. With that being said, we can't allow the risk that journalists will write in a biased manner about peolpe with whom they have personal relationships. For this reason, journalists should avoid writing about friends/lovers/relatives whenever possible and provide full disclosure otherwise.
As I see it, most instances of cronyism documented by deepfreeze aren't cases of conflict of interests per se, but rather instances in which a journalist wrote about a person/game when the possiblity of a conflict of interests being in effect was too high to allow for said coverage to occur (at least not without full disclosure being given to the readers).
The case of Lianna admitting to skewing review scores is very different from the instances of cronyism that have been revealed during the GamerGate saga. When it was shown that Patricia Hernandez was writing about Christine Love, it was not found that Hernandez had a conflict of interests. Rather, it was found out that she was in a situation that made it highly likely (but not certain, we can't know for sure) that there would be a conflict of interests in her reporting. In the case of Liana on the other hand, we have a journalist not only admitting to have experienced a conflict of interests between her professional duties and her desire to help game devs, but also explicity confirming that her non-professional interests overcame her professional ones. What exactly is her relationship with the game devs she helped is immaterial when it comes to assessing her ethical conduct; a cofnlict of interests can also exist without a personal relationship between a journalist and the subject of his/her writing.
IMO this is far than enough for Lianna to have a deepfreeze entry. I gather that Lianna claimed that her comments about inflating review scores was just a joke. If this is indeed the case, we should make note both of Liana's comments and her defense of them and let the readers decide for themselves what to think.