The Sleeping Car -- Pornomag: 3 of 7

ornomag
[A Media Analysis of the Time Cyberporn Story]

Page 3 of 7 - Back to start

The first contact that Philip Elmer-DeWitt, author of the Time story, had with Marty Rimm and his study was in November 1994, when Rimm gave an advance copy of the study to the administration at Carnegie Mellon. The administration, fearful of being charged under state law with knowingly distributing obscene material, decided to pull the plug on all Usenet newsgroups carrying discussion or depictions of sex. The students (led by then-student body president Declan McCullagh) protested the decision, pointing out that the administration was restricting the reading matter of adults to what was acceptable for children, and that while images could still sometimes be declared obscene, written works could not (Elmer-DeWitt "Censoring").

Elmer-DeWitt wrote a story about the CMU controversy for Time, for which he tried to get in touch with Rimm. Rimm was, according to Elmer-DeWitt,

...hard to get ahold of during the week that I was doing that story, so I had to interview a number of people, Marvin Sirbu [Rimm's faculty advisor] and others, to find out what this study was in order to fully report what had happened. Finally, late in the week, he [Rimm] got back to me, and I went over how I had described the study, and he said "geez, I can't believe you got that right!" He ended up being impressed by how I managed, he thought accurately, to characterize his study. A few months later, he emailed me and asked whether Time would be interested in getting first crack at it, when the study was finally ready for publication. So from the beginning, Rimm was talking about giving us an exclusive look at this study. (Brickman 1)

As Mike Godwin, staff counsel for the Internet free speech advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says, "for a journalist, there are few compliments more effective than 1) praising one's accuracy and 2) praising one's insight" (Godwin 5).

Interestingly, however, Rimm's praise of Elmer-DeWitt's accuracy concerning the study was wholly unfounded (Godwin 5; Meeks 2-3). Elmer-DeWitt reports that Rimm "made an elaborate analysis of the sexually oriented material available online. ...he put together a picture collection that rivaled Bob Guccione's (917,410 in all)..." (Elmer DeWitt "Censoring" 1); as discussed above, Rimm's 917,410 figure (a) refers only to one- line text descriptions of image files, not images themselves, and more importantly (b) refers to "adult" BBSs, which are not on the Internet, not in any way part of the Usenet, and not available on the Carnegie Mellon network. Rimm's "elaborate analysis" is in fact of these BBSs, while his analysis of the Usenet is cursory and fragmentary. Over a four month period, he found only 1,641 images (pornographic or not) posted to the five highest-porn- content (according to his own research) newsgroups. This works out to about three image postings per day to each of these newsgroups; as anyone who subscribes to active discussion newsgroups can attest, it is not unusual to receive 50-100 posts per day from one newsgroup. And yet, it was Rimm's study which caused the CMU administration to eliminate more than 80 newsgroups from their server (DeWitt "Censoring" 2).

Elmer-DeWitt had not even seen the study as yet; all he had to report on were the findings of the Carnegie Mellon administration, who were clearly so technologically or scientifically unsophisticated that they had misunderstood Rimm's study. But Rimm, the study's author, had not misunderstood; he had presented his findings to the CMU administration to warn them of a threat which he knew was not real, and he then complimented Philip Elmer-DeWitt on reporting which he knew was misinformed.