The Sleeping Car -- Pornomag: 6 of 7

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[A Media Analysis of the Time Cyberporn Story]

Page 6 of 7 - Back to start

As Hoffman and Novak write, "it is highly unlikely (at least without a cover story by Time) that an unsophisticated, poorly executed, weakly documented study conducted by an undergraduate in electrical engineering that was not published in a rigorously peer-reviewed behavioral science journal would ever be perceived as a 'gold mine' by experts..." (Hoffman "Critique" 3). It is also highly unlikely that this study would be mentioned in debate on the Senate floor in support of an pro-censorship bill and go unchallenged, at least without a laudatory and inflammatory cover story in Time; in fact, it was not the study (which had still not been published), but rather the Time article, which was (erroneously) quoted by Senator Grassley on the floor of the Senate and entered into the Congressional Record (United States S9017-S9021).

The most clearly and egregiously wrong segment of the Time article is the paragraph which states "There's an awful lot of porn online. In an 18-month study, the team surveyed 917,410 sexually explicit pictures, descriptions, short stories, and film clips. On those Usenet newsgroups where digitized images are stored, 83.5% of the pictures were pornographic" (Elmer-DeWitt "Cyberporn" 38). This passage confuses two separate sections of Rimm's study, to arrive at a conclusion which neither support. The 917,410 figure refers to verbal descriptions of image and other files found on commercial "adult" BBSs (Rimm "Marketing" 2); it does not refer to the Usenet, where only 2354 pornographic images were found (Rimm "Marketing" 10). BBSs, as discussed above, can only semantically be considered "online;" they are not part of the Internet, and require paying adult customers to contact them via modem over phone lines. Elmer-DeWitt waits until midway through the Next Page to make clear that the Usenet is not a synonym of the Internet -- it makes up only 11.5% of Internet backbone traffic, and only 3% (by message count) of this 11.5% is taken up by pornographic imagery newsgroups (Rimm "Marketing" 8). This is a very small portion of "online" . Thus, these two figures, although placed right next to each other, have nothing to do with one another; and neither individually nor collectively do they support the statement that "there's an awful lot of porn online."

This paragraph of the Time article is clearly the source of Senator Grassley's statement the day of Time's release that "The university surveyed 900,000 computer images. Of these 900,000 images, 83.5% of all computerized photographs available on the Internet are pornographic. Mr. President, I want to repeat that: 83.5% of the 900,000 images surveyed -- these are all on the Internet -- are pornographic, according to the Carnegie Mellon study" (United States S9017). While neither the Rimm study nor the Time article state what Mr. Grassley stated, it is easy to see how through Elmer-DeWitt's misleading reporting a technically unsophisticated reader could gain exactly that misunderstanding.

And Time has not taken responsibility for its misrepresentations. Two weeks later, Philip Elmer-DeWitt published a short article discussing the criticisms of Rimm and the study which had come to light. However, about Time's complicity in the arrangement, he said only, "some clearly believe that Time, by publicizing the Rimm study, was contributing to a mood of popular hysteria, sparked by the Christian Coalition and other radical-right groups, that might lead to a crackdown" (Elmer-DeWitt "Fire Storm" 57). He did not mention that Time had misrepresented what the study had said, nor did he mention that Time was fully aware of many of the flaws in the study before publication, and still referred to Rimm's report as an "exhaustive study of porn online.... ...A gold mine for psychologists, social scientists, computer marketers and anybody with an interest in human sexual behavior."

The letters to the editor which Time published that week also avoided the issue of Time's complicity, and even of the study's reliability, instead focusing on the bipolar framework Time had already laid out for the issue: "Can we protect our kids -- and free speech?" It printed letters of the 'average American' type; two fairly representative examples from different sides are printed below:
Why is everyone so concerned about what children see on the Internet? Parents allow their children to be bombarded daily with the garbage they see on television. Face facts, America. It is up to parents to take care of their kids, not the U.S. government. Leave the Internet alone. It is the last bastion of complete freedom.
-- James E. Kirkland; Arlington, Texas

If we lose our kids to cyberporn, free speech won't matter.
-- Nancy Jean Kelly; Elkhart, Indiana
(Various "Letters" 8)

Time did not print letters from experts in the field examining the technical flaws in the study and its own reporting, such as the one written by John Quarterman and other members of the Survey Working Group of the Internet Research Task Force. The letter provides an examination of some of the most egregious errors in the story, and calls for Time to "publish a retraction of the article in question...and take a leading role in providing real information about the Internet to the public by publishing a balanced in-depth examination of the Internet, including both sides of the Internet censorship debate" (Quarterman et. al. 1- 2).

And the rest of the media did little better at reporting the truth. At best they reported the critiques of the study along with "objective" coverage of Time and Rimm sticking to their guns, even though Rimm could rally no experts in the field of Internet research to his side (Rimm continued to cite the three "experts" who had endorsed his study, and the fact that the Georgetown Law Journal would not publish a suspect study; this despite the fact that the Law Journal is not a scientific journal, and his "experts" were all professors of law, who later stressed that they were not social scientists and did not intend to be seen as endorsing Rimm's methodology (Godwin 5)) (Corcoran C1-C3). But many reporters utterly failed to get the story. The New York Time s characterized all the critics of the study as free-speech "advocates," rather than research experts (Lewis A40); and even noted Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz focused not on Time's "alleged sins" but on the email "flaming" of a poor, repentant Elmer-DeWitt, stating that "if Time's packaging was a bit much...the online reaction was off the charts" (Kurtz C1-C3).