Sony’s Concord might be the biggest entertainment failure of all time, so why wasn’t it news?
Even in your own reply, you provide some context for what you’re discussing. For it to be lacking in the article is just lazy.
That’s because we are having a meta discussion about a meta discussion. To put it another way, we are engaged in a self-referencing discussion. To talk about such a discussion in solely general terms would render the rhetoric useless to anyone outside of academics. We would have to write in completely mathematical terms.
Again, it’s not laziness, but off topic. The term in essay writing is paragraph drift, but since it would be off topic for the article as a whole a more accurate term might be article drift.
A hypothetical complaint about cat memes not getting mainstream coverage is a meta discussion about coverage not cat memes.
The point about bringing up Concord’s flop is that it in particular is comparable to other media that the mainstream news does report on, such as expensive movie flops, but it still isn’t being covered. Why Concord flopped has nothing to do with that and that kind of context wouldn’t add anything to the article’s central point. The article also uses Joker 2 as an example, but doesn’t go into why Joker 2 flopped for the same reason. Why Concord flopped would be as off topic as taking about Concord’s game play mechanics, while possibly interesting, they aren’t relevant to the discussion either. Just because Concord’s flop is relevant to this discussion doesn’t mean all things related to Concord are relevant.
These kind of meta discussions about media coverage are important as they are a self-examination of a critical institution. A self-referential discussion is its own kind of genre and has its own rules, or guidelines, for what it is and isn’t relevant. So it’s definitely important that people understand that and don’t mistake this useful kind of journalism as lazy. Trying to placate this misunderstanding would render the article less rhetorically effective on delivering its central point. It’s like Paul’s analogy in Dune. He shouldn’t have to cut his dominate hand off to please his space jihadists. That wouldn’t be useful. edit: typo
The article is not about Concord’s flop. The article is about the mainstream media not covering video games.
Discussing off topic details is off topic. One example being the main example does not make everything related to that example relevant to the discussion. Video games news media outlets have been discussing Concord’s flop in detail. The mainstream news media has not. It’s not a valid to criticism to point out that the article didn’t discuss Concord’s flop in the meta discussion about video game coverage. Kotaku isn’t being lazy or hypocritical. The author wrote a rhetorically effective article. Everything in the article relates back to their central point. Which again is that mainstream media doesn’t take video games seriously.
It’s important to drive this home. Relating back to the thesis in a persuasive essay is a core aspect of that genre.
Sony’s Concord might be the biggest entertainment failure of all time, so why wasn’t it news?
This is the question that the article attempts to answer. Everything in the article should relate back to a thesis that answers this question. The details of Concord’s flop do not relate back to the thesis to answer this question in anyway. edit: typos