Gamers across the country are ready to hang CNET's higher-ups with their controller cords. And they probably would if their controllers weren't cordless.

Gamespot Editorial Director Jeff Gerstmann was ousted from his post last week after more than 10 years of tenure. And while Gamespot denies it, speculation suggests the site's parent company, CNET, was dismayed by a less-than-warm review of recent shooter title “Kane & Lynch.” Shortly after posting both a print and video review of the game, Gerstmann was locked out of his office, the former review was revised and the latter was removed from the site.

Internet scuttlebutt suggests a conflict of interest prompted Gerstmann's exit. “Kane's” publisher, Eidos, spent a weighty sum of money to advertise the game on Gamespot.com. It is therefore widely believed that Eidos pressured CNET and Gamespot into immediately firing Gerstmann, or doing so after he refused to brighten the review at their behest.

If this story is true, you don't need me to tell you how vile it was of Gamespot to can a critic for voicing his displeasure with a game. You already know that it not only cheats that critic out of being sincere, but it cheats you, the reader, out of learning from their sentiments.

But what you might not know is how swiftly this story fails to surprise. Video game criticism is still in its infancy, and it has yet to penetrate public journalism the way film or music writing has. It's not often that newspapers run game reviews. Only lately have national magazines like Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone given even meager coverage to the medium.

Yet gaming is just as giant an industry as any other in the entertainment realm, as demonstrated by “Halo 3”s first-day sales of $170 million - a record-setting number that extends to all media.

Without much mainstream coverage of their pastime, millions of worldwide gamers go to niche publications like Gamespot for their dose of video game news and reviews. And because these publications require knowledgeable sources on the subject of games, they most often staff video game enthusiasts who are all too glad to barter their services for free software and hardware on top of their salaries. By associating themselves so closely with game companies, critics place themselves in the position of skewing their opinions in order to preserve that association.

So we have what Los Angeles Times writer Alex Pham dubbed, “Playola.” Writers leash their observations in favor of those who lavish them at press junkets. It's been this way since Bill Kunkel established Electronic Games in 1981. He once observed, “To an extent, we were cheerleaders for the industry - we loved these games, we wanted to see more of them, we wanted to keep writing about them.”

Gamespot has made efforts to strive for editorial integrity and they have defended those efforts in the face of allegations of advertiser pressure to dismiss Gerstmann. In a 2003 Online Journalism Review discussion of video game journalistic ethics, former Gamespot executive editor Gregory Kasavian stated, “Our reviewers are completely distanced from the developers and publishers ... They have no other goal than to scrutinize a product and decide whether it's worth recommending to people who spend money and time on games.”

But if the allegations of Gamespot's actions toward Gerstmann prove true, the site - and the establishment they represent - have a long way to go before reaching that elusive goal of editorial autonomy in video game journalism.

Staff writer David Wilcox reviews video games for The Citizen. He can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 245 or david.wilcox@lee.net