The problem is that Beth hypes Fallout 3 (in part) for its ultra-violence. Most games allowing childkilling went under the radar because they treated violence more as a consequence of the gameplay or storyline rather than a distinguishing feature. Deus Ex 2 (though bombing for having deviated too far from the design of the first part) went absolutely unnoticed because while you could go on a killing spree against innocents and light children on fire, it was never defined by those features.
I agree that the media does tend to use absurd examples (e.g. Counter Strike as a "murder simulator" even though it doesn't depict much violence apart from split-second blood spurts and underwhelmingly dropping dead with a bored grunt), but the vast majority of games it picks on are easily picked on for trying to put the player in a "real world" situation.
Hit Man or Manhunt or even GTA are easy choices because they all depict worlds that are very similar to the world western players live in. GTA in particular makes no fuss of the sociopathic behaviour the main character tends to show.
The main mistake of such games is that they use "real world" situations and then hype the aspect of, say, just running over that hooker to get your money back or blowing up police cars and consecutively beating up the medics in order to steal their car.
There's nothing morally wrong with games that put you in the position of a sociopath. Games are about escapism, so it makes sense to put the player in a position they are unlikely to experience in reality and which may make them feel a bit uncomfortable.
Neither is it immoral to let the player use a game as a way to build up adrenaline (which is a very nice feeling and the main reason people like sports) or release their aggression against innocent pixels. Choking unarmed bystanders to death with plastic bags may not be in everybody's taste, but it hardly justifies the outrage it produces.
The only reason the media uses video games for target practice as opposed to films or books as it used to (the phenomenon is hardly new -- books used to be criticised for poisoning the mind ages ago) -- is that for the first time the "user" is put in control of the situation. To run over a hooker in a video game you need to actively decide to do so (or at the very least, let it happen without intervening). From personal experience video games can seem more horrifying for an observer than the player himself, though, as the observer is unable to intervene even if he wanted to -- possibly the reason some films I saw shocked and horrified me more than any game I ever played or heard mentioned.
The point, however, is moot. The actions of people in games have no relation whatsoever to the actions of the same people in the real world, just as porn doesn't make rapists (actually, a study found that the advent of the internet in poor regions decreased the prevalence of violent crimes and rapes -- possibly because the would-be criminals can act out their fantasies without making them real) and war movies don't make soldiers.
The real shocker is that players might acquire a taste for whatever it is that the game depicts. This is the same logic the US Army used when developing its own war game, which, IMO, is far more dangerous because it does its best at masking the brutality of war with the intent to romantify the life of a soldier. The logic does seem to have a major flaw, however: most people need more to convince them into a life of fragging the other team's toons and capturing their flags than a simple game. The game is certainly promotional in nature, but advertisements can't force people into actions -- they merely show them their options, so that potential customers are directed towards the preferable action.
Most humans are neither impressionable enough, nor do they already have a growing taste for massacring innocents or raping poor sods that wouldn't escalate without games acting as "advertisement" of that same behaviour. If the army game is the tiny shove some recruits needed in order to decide to throw their lives away to be pawns in an international game of multiplayer chess, that hardly goes to show that those people otherwise never would have done so -- it might just have taken them a little bit longer without the ads.
The reason the media likes to kick games around as the Evil of the 21st century is that they are an easy victim (film makers have a lobby and Hollywood is accepted as a major source of income, real porn has become too widespread to make any kind of target at all), easily generalisable (because most targets of these "reports" don't understand them good enough to see the nuances) and, in conjunction with murderous children, a nearly endless supply of fear: and fear sells best, especially in the USA (don't believe it? Just watch the local news and tell me whether you think the reports on murders and violent crimes are proportional).
Nobody wants to see children play Manhunt or chat about their fun experiences of shooting and killing policemen or stealing cars. That's why these games are NOT for children. If children have easy access to these games and their parents don't understand enough and don't care enough to find out, then that's a very bad thing, but hardly the developer's fault. There were some games (a minority that would be statistically uninteresting if their plans had failed) that lived off the drama-turned-hype the media produced around them and were targeted at minors way under the recommended age, but these games are not a disease, they're merely a symptom. So are finds of Wolfenstein or Doom in the hands of eight year olds who happened to be mentally unstable (which nobody ever noticed because nobody ever cared or dared to think about it) and decided to shoot their school bully in the head.
All this poses one major problem: if the citizenship is not mature enough to be expected to be able to play games without acting like robots and mimicking the actions they portray, how can said citizenship be expected to be mature enough to decide who should lead them and write their laws, or whether invading that middle eastern country is really the best idea when the middle east already hates their guts and only needs a little more proof that they are the big Satan their texts warned them about?
In short, how is democracy supposed to work if the demos (citizenship, for the linguistically impaired) is too stupid to function as generally expected?
Humans are easily manipulated, yes, but that is why humans need to be aware of how they can be manipulated in order to prevent being manipulated. But who'd want citizens that can't be manipulated? It'd kinda defeat the purpose of election-related hype and politician's promises, not to mention: advertisements, boot-licking previews and FOX News.