This thread title (edit: now former thread title, thanks mods) is appropriate considering it's just as bizarre as everything else to do with this story.
The original article was atrocious, a half baked accusation with zero effort made to actually do their due diligence despite the obviously pretty damaging accusation and subtle racism that comes along with not doing so, the reveal that the article seemed to have been published early against the will of the writer and that they didn't want to put it up before actually getting a response, the subsequent seeming gagging of the writer and finally this apology which comes along whilst the original article is still up, basically invalidating it completely.
Whilst I do think the writer just fucked up and wrote a dumb, low effort article, it feels like it's more the site itself that is trying to milk this for all its worth, getting all those controversy clicks while they can despite the harassment the writer is getting.
All in all this is kind of the encapsulation of the issues with games journalism. No, not that it's SJW propaganda or whatever bullshit the manbabies on Twitter are screaming today, but that it's often just blatantly unprofessional. This is an article throwing out accusations of ableism against people across the world based on a mishearing of someone singing in accented English. Hell, even if it's revealed in the coming days that she totally is using the slur, the articles jump to damaging, slanderous conclusions wouldn't be validated, since all that would prove is that they took what could have been a decent small article highlighting an issue with a known problematic company and instead churned out a clickbait nothing piece to capitalise on the hottest new Smash character.
I'd hope that people would learn from this, but they won't. The same way no one is going to really talk about the harassment because "hey, she deserved it, right?" as if the harassment is anything other than an outlet for horrible people to release their horrible feelings.
