The rule for political action groups seems to be “If you want to make headlines, claim the kids are at risk.” That certainly was the case at the end of July when the news media made much of the results of a survey conducted by think tank Third Way that concluded that not only had the number of adult websites grown from 14 million in 1998 to 420 million today, but that 12-to-17-year-old boys were the top consumers of Internet pornography.
Most of the media reacted to the story with contrived shock and horror, running headlines like “Porn Dominates the Internet” and “Teens at Risk.” ABC News weighed in with a poll that found that 44 percent of all teenage boys have visited a sexually explicit website at least once. Media bias? Not really. More a case of lead with the lurid, because lurid sells.
Unfortunately, lurid is often far from accurate and only tells part of the story. Closer examination revealed that the entire furor had been fermented by veteran smut-foe and longtime moralist Sen. Joe Lieberman and his gang of right-leaning Democrats who, since at least the 2000 election, have attempted to prove that they are as strong on family values as the Republicans. The Third Way study was commissioned by Lieberman’s group in support of the proposed new tax bill introduced into the Senate by one of their own, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), that would impose what amounts to a 25 percent sales tax on all Internet porn.
A look, however, at the numbers behind the Third Wave study reveals major flaws. It fails to place the supposed porn “explosion” in the context of massive and continuous overall Internet growth. It also didn’t differentiate between visitors to a site and those who actually made purchases or bought a subscription. This was pointed by former AVN Online editor Tom Hymes, who, in his role as communications director for the Free Speech Coalition, made it clear that Third Way had examined a business model that “didn't work and was ditched by most websites around 2001.” Unfortunately, Hymes’s response failed to receive the same blanket coverage as the Third Wave claims.
And Lincoln’s new tax bill is fraught with the same kind of flaws and misconceptions as the analysis of the Third Way poll results. The most glaring is that it’s domestic U.S. legislation, and as such is not only a boon to foreign porn site operators, but a major incentive for all of adult online entertainment to move nominally offshore and use URLs and domains located out of U.S. jurisdiction.
If we take a step back and look at the overall picture, however, a pattern seems to emerge. Sensational media coverage leads to an uninformed stampede to “Do Something” about porn, indecency, or perceived sexual content. Politicians publicly flex their supposed muscle, but the end product is almost always the same—some proposal that is both unconstitutional and totally unworkable.
As a recent editorial in The Los Angeles Times pointed out on the subject of the equally misguided demands that pornography be isolated in an “.xxx” Web ghetto, “Pornography, like humidity in Houston, is part of the climate of the Internet. It can occasionally be contained, but it cannot be controlled.”
The time seems right to maybe take a closer look of the real agenda of many of these moral crusaders, because I suspect it would reveal nothing less than a crude but concentrated bottom-line effort to make all areas of communication not as yet under government control – the Internet, cable TV, and satellite radio – subject to FCC-style regulation. Politicians talk a great deal about the will of the people, but when the marketplace clearly proves that the will of the people is to consume pornography, listen to Howard Stern, and watch uncut movies on premium cable, yet they continue to lobby for censorship and even concoct questionable statistics to justify it, their real goal can only be centralized control. And that’s not democracy—just totalitarianism in a different suit.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.
