Has gamespot becomes a whore?

I use to like the gamespot site but with my favorite reviewers leaving the site I was finding the site to be less and less reliable. Today I found out (thanks to the Penny Arcade comic http://www.penny-arcade.com/ ) that my favorite reviewer, Jeff Gerstmann, not only was leaving gamespot but was being fired for writing a negative review of one of their larger sponsor's games. If this turns out to be true, this act alone means that no gamespot review can be trusted. They have gone from a trusted semi-reliable source to a site to be avoided overnight.

Apparently gamespot is claiming that it was the tone of the review that got him fired. Having watched the review, which now seems to have vanished from the site, I can only say that the review was very well done. Any site that would let let advertising revenue determine the rating a review receives is clearly not worth bothering with. I should probably point out that gamespot is owned by cnet and that I will have to assume that all cnet owned sites are tainted likewise. I should also mention that eidos is the publisher of the game being reviewed, though as they haven't made a good game in a long time there is not much to boycott.

I am still holding out hope that this is all one big misunderstanding. Game reporting has been steadily dropping in quality everywhere so seeing my last semi-decent source of gaming news vanish is a sad day. I guess editorial integrity is a thing of the past. Sadly, other than not visiting or supporting the sites above, the only other thing I can do is show my disrespect of them by purposely not capitalizing their names, which sadly is only going to be noticed by English teachers.