I don't think gaming journalists are pushing for a social agenda, I think they have a certain idea of what games are and of what they want them to be. What they want them to be is a cultural product that can reach the... let's say sophistication and maturity of other cultural products. One of the facet of this evolution should be the quality of the writing, in plots, in themes and also in representations. This is something that is shared with other narrative media so the academic world is pretty well armed to analyze this kind of issues from different vantage points (narratology, gender studies, sociology, pscho-analysis, etc), which, to answer fanaskin, is less true for the 'video game causes violence' argument which is usually not originating from academic sources (see also the same argument made for TV, movies, PnP RPG, metal, rock 'n roll, top hats, etc).
As Leigh Alexander mentioned in the Gamasutra piece, the cultural references for most games are Hollywood blockbusters and comic books (which is increasingly one and the same, but that's a debate for the movie house!), so I am not overly surprised that someone analyzing video games through the prism of gender studies finds the medium problematic. Are you surprised? Do you think the overall point is invalid? I have not read the articles, so they might very well be poorly written and hyperbolic, but it seems to me it's difficult to argue that the representation of women is lacking when compared to other media and it's really even more difficult to argue that we are not cultural beings, shaped in no small part by the cultural products we consume and how we consume them.
