I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, I'm saying it's bad journalism and it's unprofessional, in a lot of ways.
As far as whether or not Kotaku is a blog, that's up for debate, too. They monthly bundle up just about all their stories and act like they "could" be a magazine. They go to press events created for games journalism, and they get a lot more exclusive interviews and similar things than actual games journalism does. The "blog" idea is simply used as a defense to not be held accountable for their sometimes shoddy journalism. There will be days when you'll see four or five stories up on Kotaku with quite a few factual errors and invalid premises. They'll post stories with incorrect post times on them, to look like they're more consistent. Just all around, they're very bad journalists, and they seem to use the "blog" label as an excuse, rather than as a method to exercise editorial opinion.
It's just a bad website, and that's all. Their appeal is that they do pick up a lot of news, from just about everywhere, but it's not their editorial or writing abilities. Since Kotaku does pick up exclusive stuff, they're visited over sites like IGN and GameStop because they've got links to anything interesting on those sites.
In all fairness, though, recently they have been trending toward more and better written opinion pieces. Over the past few weeks, I've noticed fewer mistakes and inaccuracies, as well. Perhaps they're trending for the better, I don't know. I think a lot of issues were from one of their editors who hasn't posted stories in a month, Luke Plunkett, but they've been the epitome of professionals who hide behind their name one day, then whine and/or gloat about how they're better than the news sites because of the original stories they make and create. To me, that's a serious identity crisis that's fostered many of their problems.