Gamepolitics.com has been a reliable source for politically charged gaming talk for a few years now, and since it's backed by the Entertainment Consumer Association (the ECA), it bears a sense of reliability. So when this story landed, it sent shockwaves through the Internet.

Reported yesterday on The Escapist, E3 keynote speaker and Texas Governor Rick Perry had attended a church service in 2006 presided by minister John Hagee, in which Hagee made some controversial comments, recorded here by the Dallas Morning News in 2006:

"Gov. Rick Perry, after a God and country sermon attended by dozens of political candidates Sunday, said that he agreed with the minister that non-Christians will be condemned to hell.

'In my faith, that's what it says, and I'm a believer of that,' the governor said.

...Asked afterward at a political rally whether he agreed with Mr. Hagee, the governor said he didn't hear anything that he would take exception to. He said that he believes in the inerrancy of the Bible and that those who don't accept Jesus as their savior will go to hell."

When Gamepolitics first ran the story, their subject line contained a direct quote from Perry, supposedly associated with this service. It later was found that he not been credited with any such quote.

The Entertainment Software Association, the organization who runs E3, picked up Gamepolitic's story quickly and, in reaction to the false quote, replied thusly:

 "If the ESA posted a blog and called it a news site, journalists would rightfully balk and it wouldn't pass a smell test. Remarkably, GamePolitics doesn't face the same scrutiny even though it's funded by the ECA and tainted with anti-ESA vitriol. At the end of the day, calling GamePolitics a news site is as laughable as saying there's a Cuban free press."

So was the ESA right in picking Rick Perry for E3 2008? Is Gamepolitics.com overstepping their bounds? Is the ECA too lenient with what they allow Gamepolitics to print? Does it affect us gamers at all?