To: "S. Finer" , online-news@marketplace.com
Cc: gsa1001@cus.can.ac.uk.marketplace.com
Sender: owner-online-news@marketplace.com
Precedence: bulk

S. Finer  writes:
 
>attack on the CMU study appears to be a strawman from where I sit, a 
>surrogate for the crowd that prefers to deny both the substance and 
>political salience of concern over net porn.

Scott:

As I mentioned to you by private EMail last week: You are missing the entire 
point of why I brought to the attention of this list both the Time Magazine 
cover story and the apparently bogus research it was based upon.

No one at all denies that there is pornography on the 'Net or the political 
salience of its presence.

The point here is the journalistic issues, not pornography issue. It is that 
the world's largest news magazine based a cover story upon a study which 
experts in the field had forewarned it was based upon bogus methodology and 
was not an official Carnegie-Mellon University sociological study 'by a team 
of experts' on the Internet (as Time labelled it) but an undergraduate 
project by an electrical engineering student. Despite these forewarnings, 
Time went ahead and published an 'exclusive' cover story based on this bogus 
research at a time when the U.S. Congress is debating the Exon Amendment and 
the Communications Decency Act, a time when journalistic probity about the 
Internet content must be at its best. A journalism issue about online.

I had raised this issue on 'online-news' because:
(a) The editors and reporters here understand the Internet better than most 
and thus might have some responsibility to provide objective follow-up 
reporting about an issue that Time has sensationalized.
(b) The publications creating websites also might have some subjective 
interest in debunking that sensationalism, lest it daunt or intimidate 
families from gaining 'Net access. (Sure, there is porn on the 'Net, but 
probably less, and less easily accessible, than on their local newsstand; and 
certainly not to the degree purported by Time).
(c) As Howard Rheingold, the author of "Virtual Communities" and the former 
editor of Hotwired, told the National Newspaper Association at Connections X, 
there has been way too many sensationalistic 'Porn on the 'Internet' stories 
and way too few stories about the looming issues of U.S. governmental 
censorship and regulation of the Internet; issues which are no longer 
hypothetical and, due to the preponderance of 'Net usage being in the U.S., 
would effect the network worldwide. It's time to base stories on 
objective facts, not opportunities for sensation.

>On the issue of CyberSpace democracy, clearly the Well crowd (or more 
>precisely, a self-selected sample of Well subscribers) feels that
>Time is guilty, but I wonder if the usership of the net generally agrees? 
>Certainly, the Well-opinion does not extend to the US population as a whole,
>or politicians would not be lining up to trumpet the article, eh?

Forgive me if I'm blunt in responses to your rhetoric. You're right, Jon 
Katz, media critic for Rolling Stone; John Seabrook of The New Yorker; Brock 
Meeks of Interactive Age; David Jackson of USN≀ Chip Bayers, managing 
editor of Hotwired; and the professors at the Owen Graduate School of 
Management at Vanderbilt University, who specialize in Internet demographics; 
among others on The WELL who have questioned Time's cover story, aren't 
representative of the U.S. population. What makes them nonrepresentative is 
expertise in magazine journalism and Internet and demographic issues. As for 
your wonder if the 'Net's general population agrees with them, it's clever 
but disingenous to posit an unprovable rhetorical question. Yet, I find the 
naivete of your inference, that the politicians who are lining up to trumpet 
the article are truly representative of the U.S. population, to be quite 
moving.

>Personally, I do not feel the CMU study's validity ......
>....is worth arguing over. I know the smut is there, and the
>precise number of images is immaterial to my conclusion that citizens have
>a right to be concerned.

Good to know that objective reporting and the true facts can't influence your 
opinion. Why should concerned citizins bother with how big an issue it 
actually is?

Snipped from the quote above:
>...(the attack on the 83.5% number for example depends on misattribution
> of what the article actually said)...

Defending the cover article he wrote, Time Senior Editor Philip Elmer-Dewitt 
admitted on The WELL that his article was unclear about its statement that 
83.5% of the imagery on the Internet is pornographic. He said that in drafts 
of the article he considered clarifying that the 83.5% referred to the 
'alt.sex.binary...' usesgroups which account for only 0.5% of the Internet's 
usage. But decided not to, said he, because having 'more than two 
mathematical calculations in one paragraph would be too much for readers.'

To Phil's credit, he is openly discussing some of the processes that went 
into his writing the cover story. That in itself (without legal compliance) 
is a remarkable change in journalistic culture. David Hitchum, formerly of 
the S.F. Chronicle, is writing a syndicated column about that alone. And 
Wired is working to obtain rights from the individual posters to make the 
WELL transcript public.
    
- --------------------------------------------------------
Vin Crosbie                          voice: 212-207-9290
FreeMark Communications, Inc.         fax : 212-207-9295
One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza           vin@productview.com
New York, NY 10017 USA                  www.freemark.com
      (formerly ProductView Interactive, Inc.)
Who aren't liable for this posting because it has nothing
              to do with their business.
- --------------------------------------------------------




~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 
                     The Internet Business Division
  --->     Bridging the gap between business and the Internet.     <----
  310 Wells Ct      Don Taylor, President     Hampton, VA 23666-6240 USA
  voice: 804.825.0294              email: ibd@pobox.com, docdon@pinn.net
  ***         Member Virginia Peninsula Chamber of Commerce          ***
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 


------------------------------

End of online-news-digest V1 #264
*********************************


From owner-online-news-digest@marketplace.com Mon Jul 31 23:03:06 1995
Received: from marketplace.com (majordom@marketplace.com [199.45.128.10]) by cnj.digex.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id XAA03925 ; for ; Mon, 31 Jul 1995 23:03:01 -0400