Ex-Marine Goes Missing - Fox News Blames Video Games

They aren't really blaming games, just being dumb with headlines.

Why is it that the armed services spends thousands of dollars to train our men and women to fight for our country and defend us and yet they spend zilch to help these people acclimate back into everyday society.
Fox news blaming video games and not the government for this young man's problem reprehensible, they should be ashamed.

I agree with AllThree that the story as it appears on Fox News does not go out of its way to lay blame at the feet of COD. What I had/have issue with is that the homepage image teasing the story is deliberately provocative.

There is, for all appearances, no concern on the part of Fox for the well-being of Eric Hill.

Yes it is the job of a news organization to tell the story, and in this case part of the story was that friends of Eric named COD as a possible trigger. And yes, it is the function of a website to garner clicks and pageviews for the parent company.

But the problem is that a very conscious decision was made to juxtapose the image of Eric with the image of a soldier firing his rifle (again, not the box art from the game in question...)

I did not mean to impugn the author of the story, nor did I seek to minimize the role played by COD as a trigger for Eric Hill. I merely sought to point out the blatantly inflammatory way in which video games have been used by Fox News.

It's called pattern behavior.

Yeah, it's just a matter of Fox's selective journalism when it comes to the provided picture and headline. The content of the article is not bad, as you all already talked about.
Aside from this, my favorite part about Fox News has to be the way they throw in their opinion by means of simply saying, "Some people are saying..." Such as:

"Dominic won the Super Bowl with a touchdown pass. Some people are saying he is a very hot man."

Ah crap, I liked it better when we weren't. Um, comic books stink!

Exactly. Now, we are in agreement.

Look guys,

All I'm saying is that the ONLY Call of Duty reference (besides the article headline and image) is the bold paragraph at the top, and the following sentence:

"Relatives of a missing ex-Marine wounded in Iraq fear a video game that simulates combat may have triggered war memories that led to his disappearance, Florida's Herald Tribune reported.

"After playing "Call of Duty," Eric Hall "just got up and said he had to go," Courtney Birge, a family friend, told the newspaper."

It is not like a Jack Thompson article screaming about GTA's violent content and how it corrupted society. All that is happening is that a sensational image is used to tie in the article to what Hall was doing before his episode. The image is dumb; the content is not.

Zach

I am actually jumping on AllThree's side here, while Fox is portraying sensationalism with the image on their main page, the actual article doesn't do anything to bash the game. They are right: Call of Duty may have sparked a memory that made this poor guy run. In the actual article they only mention the game once – just to say that he was playing it before he left. At the very worst they picked a dumb picture for their main page but, in all honesty, nothing more.

It's not impossible to imagine CoD causing that type of reaction. It's real enough, why not? You even acknowledge the problem with the headline/article: if he was watching the news and freaked, it wouldn't be reported. That in and of itself is not news. The fact that it was "supposedly" a game, did make it news. And that's the sad part. We probably wouldn't even have heard about this unless Fox correlated it to CoD on their headline.
"Obviously Fox is using the image and topic to rack up page views; that's the POINT of any website, for the content to be viewed." is probably the greatest indication that you aren't fully grasping the situation here. We're not talking about making stuff up on some celebrity gossip site to benefit your sponsors. We're talking about reporting the news. There's a difference between attention grabbing headlines, and headlines begging for attention.

hmm, messed up the link:

http://www.gamervision.com/gamer/sean/blog/article/gamer_uses_game_training_to_save_a_life

No, I get what he's saying. I'm just saying he's wrong.

Obviously Fox is using the image and topic to rack up page views; that's the POINT of any website, for the content to be viewed.

What I don't understand is where you see any manipulation. The story has nothing to do with the political race going on and does not blame Call of Duty 4 for creating any violent outlash. It merely states that the intensity and realism caused this young man to re-live a traumatic event.

And yes, I'm sure footage from Iraq in the news did contribute to Hall's ordeal. That seems obvious. But why is it impossible that Call of Duty triggered the episode? If he flipped out from watching and IED exploding on the news or something of the sort, would we blame the news? No, he was watching, or no, he was playing: but regardless of the source of exposure, Hall freaked out, and that's all the story reports.

Sean's article from a while back seems to show that real people can learn from video games and be influenced by the content present in those games. I'm just wondering why that cannot swing both ways, that people take good and bad elements from games and react in their own unique way.

I'm a gamer too, otherwise I wouldn't be here. I'm just saying, I do not think Sean's analysis is fair or any closer to grasping the real situation.

Zach

No one is freaked out that the man in question played Call of Duty, they're freaked out because Fox is making the game analogous to PTSD. And even then, barely. Your Apocolypse Now comparison is off base, because if this happened at the time 'Poc Now came out, and his family knew he had just watched it, you better believe the media would pose the film as the problem, and not the war.

Fox "news" is just disgusting. It's clear that they're trying to get page views with ridiculous headlines, trying to shock unsuspecting (and ignorant to the world of gaming) people into saying "Oh noes! What did video games do this time???"

The connection between the soldier's flashbacks and COD4 is irrelevant here. It's a really tragic occurence, but Fox is trying to spin it to make video games into a scapegoat once again.

Apparently while you may have "read" both the Fox article and Sean's article, you didn't understand what Sean wrote. He points out only that Fox is spinning this story so that the lead appears to be "linking video games to violence", and that "the story itself seems more willing to blame the game for this tragedy"

While Fox is the biggest offender of this type of reporting they are hardly the only purveyor of "news" guilty of this manipulation of information. Sensational sells or haven't you heard?

By the way the Institute of Mental Health statement would make a great story to spin the other way since staying away from anything that reminds you of your experience would be the NEWS.

I wonder if you even read the article, Sean. While most of us can agree that Fox has an agenda, seriously, did you even read it?

If you didn't, let me help: "Relatives of a missing ex-Marine wounded in Iraq fear a video game that simulates combat may have triggered war memories that led to his disappearance, Florida's Herald Tribune reported."

The key here? "...triggered war memories."

Oh, and: "Hall had been hallucinating and having flashbacks, the sheriff's office said." And the part about Hall witnessing his friend's decapitation doesn't sound too fun.

Now I see where you're coming from but Fox is not blaming Call of Duty for what happened. It would be a different story and one that would make sense for you to comment on it Hall had been some regular kid NOT returning from an active war zone. If he was an average young man that flipped out and hurt someone, and Fox blamed Call of Duty, then you would have a reason to run your mouth.

All this story says is that Call of Duty, a game rated M for the violence and graphic content of a modern-day war, triggered some memory in him that forced him to run. He didn't even hurt anyone, so why exactly do you have a problem with this?

Would you get so freaked out if a Vietnam Vet had been watching Apocalypse Now and had a flashback? I doubt it.

The story isn't blaming the game. It's a clear connection between the true-to-life action in the game and what Hall experienced. Having said that, it would have helped if Fox had used an actual image from Call of Duty 4 in their story. But the image makes its point that the game is violent and true-to-life.

From The National Institute of Mental Health: "If you have PTSD, you often have nightmares or scary thoughts about the experience you went through. You try to stay away from anything that reminds you of your experience." (link: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-a-real-illness/complete-publication.shtml)

So yes, it might have been a mistake for Hall to be playing the game, but it isn't the game's fault. All it did was link his experience in real life back to him. Mass Effect promoting homosexuality and sexual deviance is hardly likely; Call of Duty 4 causing an Iraq war vet to have violent flashbacks and run away? Why is that so hard to believe?

Zach Geiger

They can't blame video games here. ANYTHING could have triggered this guy. Hope they find this guy soon.

I really hope they find him, but it was his own free wil to play the game and he was having flashbacks which caused him to run away. Isn't Post Traumatic Stress Disorder the reason for him running away?