Jenny McCarthy, who became famous by posing naked for pictures so that men could masturbate to them, made a guest appearance on Sesame Street Friday and the event hardly raised an eyebrow. Of course it's been years since McCarthy posed nude for anything and she is now an author of bestselling parenting books and an advocate for children with autism. Nevertheless, she wasn't asked on Sesame Street because she is an author. She was asked on Sesame Street because she is famous, and the reason she is famous is porn.

PBS should probably be commended for not simply blackballing McCarthy because of decisions she made in the past, especially decisions toddlers would have no way of knowing and couldn't care less about.

Except that wasn't their stated policy two years ago when they fired Melanie Martinez.

Melanie Martinez was the host of the Good Night Show, a joint production of PBS and Sesame Workshop that appears on the PBS Sprout channel. She was fired in 2006 when the network discovered that, years before she was hired by PBS, Martinez had appeared in two :30 parodies of abstinence PSA's. In one, she promotes the virtues of anal sex. In the other she decides to put off sex with boys when her mother gives her a vibrator. She is fully clothed and the dialogue includes no profanity (unless you consider the phrase "anal sex" profane).

At the time PBS president (now PBS CEO) Paula Kerger backed the decision claiming that Martinez was not "representative of PBS and Sesame and kids entertainment."

It is a strange world in which Melanie Martinez lives, one where she is publicly fired and shamed for appearing in two obscure low budget films with a total sixty seconds of running time, and then has to watch while one of the superstars of soft-core pornography, a person who has appeared in studio features with far more offensive material (and viewed by many more millions of people) than anything ever done by Martinez, is welcomed on PBS's flagship kids show with a fanfare of press releases and publicity stills.

It's so absurd, in fact that it raises the question once again that perhaps Martinez was fired not because of the sexual content of those videos, but rather the political content. Her public humiliation might have been collateral damage caused by PBS and Sprout executives trying to curry favor with conservative lawmakers who keep pulling the purse strings at public television tighter and tighter.

Perhaps the a-word that did in Melanie Martinez really wasn't "anal," but "anti-abstinence."

3:00 PM :: Comments (20)

What you can't say in the Los Angeles Times: "When the credits rolled, a preteen girl seated to my right exclaimed, 'That was [expletive] awesome!'"

What you can say:

Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal...

The sexually explicit material on the site was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual, and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches in snug-fitting clothing or underwear....

Among the sexually explicit material on his site that he defended as humorous were two photos. In one, a young man is bent over in a chair and performing fellatio on himself. In the other, two women are sitting in what appears to be a cafe with their skirts hiked up to reveal their pubic hair and genitalia. Behind them is a sign reading "Bush for President."...

He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

The defense of self-censorship is always that children read these newspapers (as if) and that it is important to maintain a "sophisticated and civil tone." But as the Alex Kozinksi story shows, the real issue is certain taboo words. How can it be inappropriate for a young person to read that someone their own age said "fucking awesome" about a museum exhibit, yet be perfectly fine for them to read about a "half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal"?

Normally in these posts I complain about how self-censorship actually makes straightforward news stories unnecessarily confusing or inaccurate. But in this case, it's the LAT's excessively clinical descriptions that give a false impression, especially when coupled with the repeated use of words like "pornographic" and "bestiality." When you actually see the pictures [NSFW@LAT] it's clear that Kozinski is being honest when he says posted them not because he thought they were sexy, but because he thought they were funny. Hell, the sexually aroused farm animal video is tagged both "Funny" and "Hilarious."

Frankly, I'm a little disturbed that anyone over the age of 14 -- much less a judge -- finds this crap funny. It's people like Kozinksi who are responsible for forwarding every dumb-ass picture they find on eBaum's world, and for that, sure, fire his ass. But for trafficking in pornography? I don't think so.

9:51 PM :: Comments (20)

You will be shocked to hear that I have some questions and comments about today's front page New York Times story on an agreement by Internet providers to block sites that disseminate kiddie porn. This isn't necessarily an indictment of the agreement or the article, just a reminder that these things have a way of not being discussed as thoroughly as they should be.

First, here's the lede.

Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography... Many in the industry have previously resisted similar efforts, saying they could not be responsible for content online, given the decentralized and largely unmonitored nature of the Internet.

Now to the questions.

Continue reading "Blogging about child pornography is a $20 billion industry" »

12:16 PM :: Comments (39)

Trade, the film based on The Girls Next Door, Peter Landesman's 2004 New York Times magazine article about sex slaves, opens tomorrow. The L.A. Times has a story today about the controversy over Landesman's article, which, you may recall, I was somewhat involved in stirring up.

There are a few interesting new developments in the LAT piece, but first here's some background for new readers:

In his first article on The Girls Next Door, Slate's Jack Shafer wrote, "Landesman's supporting evidence is vague. Where it is not vague, it is anecdotal. Where it is anecdotal, it is often anonymous, too. And where it is not anecdotal or vague it is suspicious and slippery." Complaints about the piece, mostly, but not exclusively, from Shafer and myself, eventually led the New York Times to publish an editor's note (scroll down) about the article, and prompted the paper's ombudsman, Dan Okrent, to investigate as well.

My response to Okrent's column outlines most of the complaints and questions that still linger over Landesman's work, and is probably a good place to dive in. My initial post about the article is less coherent, but does explain why the article raised red flags for me in the first place. My specific concerns about the Internet auctions section of Landesman's article can be found here, along with the explanation of why, when the New York Times editors say the story was thoroughly checked, they don't necessarily mean that it's true. Finally, the LAT mentions the outdoor brothel at San Luis Rey. What it does not mention is that investigative reporter Debbie Nathan re-reported this section of Landesman's article for The Nation and found it wildly and irresponsibly exaggerated.

Readers curious about how Landesman himself defended his work can read his replies to my posts here, here, and here. Warning: not for the faint of heart or short of time.

Now, here's what today's LAT article adds to this story. The most important piece of new information is about those notorious "cyberauctions." Specifically that "a spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in Washington, D.C., which plays a key role in child pornography investigations, said he was not aware of any Internet auctions to purchase such victims."

The cyberauction section of Landesman's article takes place entirely at I.C.E. headquarters. It is I.C.E. agents who "verify" the auction site that Landesman found. When I posted my skepticism about this section, Landesman responded, "The website was examined by the Federal government's Cybercrimes unit, as I reported in the story, deemed authentic and criminal, and was subsequently investigated. Furthermore, this story was thoroughly factchecked by the Magazine's factchecking department; that includes this website. In other words, authorities much higher than Daniel Radosh have confirmed not only the information but the activity itself. If you really do doubt the existence of this website, or ones like it, you, like Shafer, need to get out more."

In other words, either the spokesman for the I.C.E. is unaware of the site that his own agency "deemed authentic," or Peter Landesman is a liar. (Note again that the Times never confirmed "the activity itself," only that PL passed muster because in his original article he "carefully hedged his statements with qualifiers.")

In the LAT, Landesman explains that while the film "strays for dramatic purposes," such auction sites do really exist, though the girls are overseas, not in the U.S. In other words, whatever web sites he allegedly found that form the basis for this section of the movie, they are not the same one he wrote about in his article and have never been verified by anyone. Unfortunately, that's a distinction that few people are likely to understand or appreciate. In the Boston Herald on Tuesday, Stephen Shaefer wrote that Trade "is based on a New York Times story three years ago that described a ring of sex traffickers who lured young women to Mexico, then transported them to New Jersey and sold them in online auctions."

Continue reading "Bad Trade" »

11:07 AM :: Comments (1)

A week ago I wrote that Debbie Nathan had "destroyed what was left of Kurt Eichenwald's career" by revealing that the Times reporter had made additional payments to Justin Berry, the protagonist and chief source for his high-profile 2005 story on child pornography.

It took until yesterday for the Times to report its own version of the story, adding that the newly disclosed payments amounted to "at least $1,100." This article triggered the pile-on that logically should have come a week earlier.

During that silent stretch, I wondered why no one was writing about what seemed like a pretty juicy bit of media gossip — especially since Eichenwald's practices were reported to be a factor in the recent shake up at Portfolio. [Update: Eichenwald out at Portfolio.] Choire at Gawker was apparently wondering the same thing — although his site was one of the mysteriously silent ones — and weighed in yesterday with a post titled Why no one wants to write about Kurt Eichenwald.

Choire scratches the surface of this question when he says that he hates writing about the case because it invariably triggers a cascade of e-mails, links and comments from creepy pedophiles and their enablers. I got my share of them, and no doubt will again. And Choire's right that reading anything from these smug perverts, who don't understand that their idiot rationalizations and manipulative psychologizing don't work on people older than 14, is enough to drive anyone to a hot shower.

But this "disgusting hassle" is only suggestive of the real reason that people aren't writing more about this story. The problem, I think, is that people, writers especially, can't help thinking in terms of narrative. And that in this narrative, making Eichenwald the Bad Guy seems to require (psychologically) making his antagonists the Good Guys. This is more subtle than saying journalists and bloggers avoid the story out of "fear they may be labeled pedophile sympathizers and or advocates for child porn," as one Gawker commenter says. I don't think it's that conscious a process. Rather our internal wiring tells us that we're turning the creeps into Good Guys, our reasoning tells us that can't be correct, and this causes us to blow a fuse and decide that the story is too messy to say anything about.

Eichenwald attempts to tap into that conflict in his response to the latest revelations: "I have no independent memory of any payments I am alleged to have made in June 2005 through PayPal. If these PayPal payments did occur in June 2005, I am deeply sorry that my inability to remember them has resulted in permitting a series of convicted felons to cast doubt on the nature of my wife’s and my efforts to save a young man who was caught in the grip of a cycle of drugs and abuse.”

Unfortunately, while Eichenwald may think he's shrewd to frame this as the word of convicted felons against that of a paragon of charitable virtue, the statement instead comes off slightly desperate. Hell, it's almost Landesman-esque! When asaked point blank by his editors if there was any other money he forgot about in addition to the $2000, Eichenwald forgets $1,100 made the same month, some under a false name? If he really wants us to buy that he should say it straightforwardly, rather than trying to deflect attention onto the crimes of his accusers and his own noble intentions.

Meanwhile, CrimeBlog turns up the most fun aspect of this scandal yet.

Continue reading "Fools of conspiracy" »

10:23 AM :: Comments (10)

You know all that stuff that's been drilled into your head about Internet predators? Well forget it.

In a separate study of 2,574 law-enforcement agencies, researchers found that online sex crimes rarely involve offenders lying about their ages or sexual motives. The 2004 study, published in Journal of Adolescent Health, said offenders generally aren't strangers, and pedophiles aren't luring unsuspecting children by pretending to be a peer.

I haven't read the actual study yet — and wire reports of scientific research are notoriously dicey — but if this is accurate, it's big news. Think of all the money and energy that goes into hammering home that message.

On a related note, remember that Debbie Nathan-Kurt Eichenwald kerfuffle? (That lawsuit is due just about the same time as Duke Nukem Forever.) It started when Nathan wrote an article for Salon called Why I need to see child porn. On her new blog, Nathan is back with a post cheekily titled Why I need to see child pollo-graphy. It has to be one of the worst puns ever, but it's a thought-provoking notion, comparing and contrasting the rationales for and against banning kiddie porn and banning images of cockfighting and other acts of cruelty toward animals.

My gut reaction is that the proper protest against Nathan's argument is not so much "children are not chickens" as "pornography is not a simple reproduction of an independent act." That is, with bullfighting or cockfighting, the viewing of images later is tangential to more important act of participating in the sport. With porn of any sort, the producers "participate" for the sole purpose of producing the images. I admit I haven't thought this out clearly, so I can't make a neat logical argument for why this makes a difference right now, but I believe it does — hence the concern about the extension of the animal protection law — originally targetted at crush porn (which people would not do for fun if they couldn't sell the images) — to cover cockfighting (which is best appreciated live, if that's your thing).

8:37 AM :: Comments (4)

in a column titled Pigtails and Porn — so I really had no choice in selecting an image for this post — Kathleen Parker is outraged about a new study showing that lots of kids see pornography on the internets, mostly without wanting to. Hey, I agree that this is a Bad Thing. But Parker is so outraged that her brain simply shut off half way through writing the column.

I'm not talking about all the dubious and discredited psychological and moralistic mumbo jumbo that makes up most of the column (and which isn't even worth responding to at this point). What caught my eye is one sentence in particular, which comes as part of a digression on diaper fetishists.

"Here's a bet: We'll see hate-joke legislation to protect the certifiably fragile psyches of 'adult babies,' as they call themselves, before we see anything aimed at protecting real children from Internet porn."

Like, say, the Communications Decency Act (1996), the Child Online Protection Act (1998) or the Children's Internet Protection Act (2000)?

Given Parker's fairly low standard — "anything," "aimed at" — can we agree that if it has variations of the words "protecting," "children," and "Internet" in the name, that it is a thing aimed at protecting children on the Internet?

I wonder if she's betting real dollars or Linden.

2:38 PM :: Comments (10)

At last, a kidporn raid I can get behind. Kevin Alfred Strom, founder of the National Vanguard white supremacist group, was arrested for possession of child pornography. The racist bulletin boards are overheating with talk about a Zionist conspiracy (or perhaps merely an ugly divorce from his white trash hot wife) and one of KAS's leading defenders is his friend (and ours) April Gaede, the brains behind (and spawner of) white power porn kiddies Prussian Blue (dba Dresden Angels). Anyone want to take bets on who's posing in those illicit jpegs?

Lest you think I spend my time monitoring racist discussion groups, I discovered this thread because one user linked to a post on radosh.net as evidence of "an Israeli connection" to the child pornography industry. One hint: It starts with Huck and ends with apoo.

3:13 PM :: Comments (7)

So, you know those photos that got Miss Nevada fired? They're all over the web — often censored, sometimes not. And here's what her lawyer says: "Katie wants the public to know she was 17 and had a lapse in judgment. This was an isolated incident that occurred more than five years ago when she was a minor."

17? Minor? Uh oh. That means these widely available images, distributed in part by an arm of Warner Bros., are almost certainly child pornography. Only technically? Tell it to Genarlow Wilson. A federal rap might be avoided since there are no genitals on display, but many states specifically include exposed breasts in their statutes. Put it this way: If these pictures were less widespread, say on the computer of one guy with no clout, do you doubt that he'd be in jail right now?

Hell, technically anyone who looked at these images could be prosecuted. Unless I'm mistaken, your only legal out would be if you saw them accidentally and immediately reported them to the authorities. What do you think they'd even say if you did?

Update. Nevermind! In the comments, Gina notes that the Divine Miss N has issued a new statement: "Miss Nevada, Katie Rees is issuing a correction on the statement released by her attorney yesterday regarding some photos that were published of her on the internet. That press release stated that she was 17 years old when the photos were taken. Miss Rees’ actual age when the aforementioned photos were taken was 19."

Ogle away, pervs!

9:27 PM :: Comments (8)

Something strange happens when some newspaper reporters get on the radio to discuss stories they've written. All of a sudden, the details get markedly more salacious. Here, the reporter seems to be saying, is the stuff I know to be true but couldn't prove to the satisfaction of my editors. On the Diane Rehm Show yesterday, Kurt Eichenwald added some eyebrow-raising "statistics" to his already eyebrow-raising New York Times stories. Not quite $20 billion eyebrow-raising, but red-flaggy all the same.

The following quote comes about 7 minutes in, if you want to listen for yourself.

"If your child has a webcam, I guarantee the probability is more likely than not your child has been naked on the internet. Your child may or may not be doing it for pay. Your child will almost certainly have been solicited. The number of kids — certainly last year when I started on this is now much - not nearly as bad as it was last year — but the number of kids who are appearing naked on the internet, who are creating child pornography, either for pay or for compliments, was pretty close to the number of kids who have access to webcams."

Hmm. You'd think that if he could guarantee it, it would be in the article. And let's be a little more precise, shall we? Is it "more likely than not" (as low as 51%) or "close to the number...who have access to webcams" (as high as -- what? -- 90%)? The first figure is at least within the realm of possibility, given the broad definition, but the second...?

Factor in the implication that his article last year was directly responsible for reversing this trend, and you begin to get the sense of someone with just a little too much invested in this story, someone with a need to hype it even more than it already has been.

I can't prove, of course, that there's not an amateur child pornographer in 7% of American homes, but I don't think that if I doubt it, it's just because I need to leave my comfortable Park Slope home more.

6:46 PM :: Comments (4)

More Internet panic at the Times this week. This is gonna shock you, but I have just a couple of concerns about the new two-part series on online pedophiles. Nothing terrible, to be sure. We're not in Landesman territory or anything. But I do have a few questions.

Let's start with yesterday's feature, With Child Sex Sites on the Run, Nearly Nude Photos Hit the Web.

First off, I wonder how new and newsworthy this "latest trend in online child exploitation" really is. As reporter Kurt Eichenwald notes, "the concept of for-pay modeling sites using children has been around for years. They first appeared in the late 1990’s..." And were widely and well covered at the time. Eichenwald says "The sites that have emerged in recent months, however, are markedly different." I haven't checked them out, but from his descriptions, they don't sound too different from the original "child model" sites. [Update: A reporter who has investigated this topic assures me that the new sites "are far creepier than during the 1990s."] He notes that "the newer ones are explicit in their efforts to market to pedophiles," but only in semi-private news/chat groups. Indeed, "many of the sites portray themselves on their main pages as regular modeling agencies trying to find work for their talent," just as the original 1990s versions did. I assume he didn't go back to check how those early sites were marketed, but it's likely they were just as explicit as the new ones are when they felt they were in friendly territory.

The second minor problem is with the headline, specifically the "child sex sites on the run" part. This is extrapolated from the assertion that, "In recent months, an array of investigations of the child pornography business — by the Justice Department, state and local law enforcement and Congress — have contributed to wholesale shutdowns of some of the most sexually explicit Internet sites trafficking in child images."

Now, considering that just a few weeks ago, online kiddie porn was a $20 billion a year business, you'd think the fact that it's been virtually eliminated would be the real news here. But has it? The only stab at evidence that such sites are on the run are the impressions to that effect of pedophiles in chat rooms. Hardly the most reliable sources. There should also probably be a mention of the fact that Eichenwald himself has testified in some of these investigations.

But my most serious concern about this series comes in the editor's note:

Covering this story raised legal issues. United States law makes it a crime to purchase, download or view child pornography, unless the images are promptly reported to authorities and no images are copied or retained. The Times complied with the law, disclosing what it found to appropriate authorities.

Newspapers report on criminal enterprises all the time. Maybe some Poynter type will correct me, but my understanding is that it is always illegal not to tell the authorities about someone who has committed a crime, but that reporters almost never do, and have traditionally relied on the First Amendment to protect them. It's a bedrock principle that the media should not become an arm of law enforcement. Eichenwald has famously treaded on this territory before. The last time, I praised the care and transparency with which the Times explained its reasoning. This time around, we get nothing more than a simple "we obeyed the laws," without any discussion of the larger issues involved. It would be easy enough to see a crusading prosecutor point to this as a "new standard" set by the media itself when trying to indict a reporter who does want to stand on the First Amendment to protect his sources on some other story -- probably government-secret related.

[Update]: I'm informed by actual reporters that there's a difference between protecting a source who has broken the law and breaking it yourself. Which, I guess, duh. Despite what you see in the movies, reporters can't trespass to get a story. And if you do report on law-breaking, you can be compelled to testify about it afterwards, hence Judy Miller. Still, I'm told this is something of a gray area, especially as the Times is accepting without question that these images actually fall under the law, something that is less settled than you might think from reading this.

Tomorrow: part two in this meta-series

9:50 AM :: Comments (6)

Recently, I documented my futile quest to track down the origin and veracity of a widespread claim that child pornography is a $20 billion a year business.

Today, The Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy joins the hunt. "It turns out it can be easier to enter a big number into the Congressional record, and national press coverage, than to locate its origin," writes Carl Bialik. Like me, Bialik hits a dead-end, but he does get a promise out of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: "If it is determined that this ends up not being a reliable statistic, NCMEC will...stop citing a specific number."

Even if there is a correction, of course, don't expect it to be picked up as widely as the original false claim. Still, score one for accuracy in journalism today.

10:42 AM :: Comments (2)

The New York Times report on yesterday's Internet kid sex hearings dropped a big, round number in its first sentence: "The sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad, overwhelming attempts by the authorities to curb its growth, witnesses said at a Congressional hearing on Tuesday."

$20 billion? Really?

The full transcript of the session isn't online yet, so I don't know if it was really witnesses, plural, who made that claim, or just the one witness identified in this Louisville Courier-Journal article: "Online child pornography is a $20 billion annual business, said Ernie Allen, president and chief executive officer of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, based in Alexandria, Va."

In any case, both the Times and the L/C-J weren't listening closely. Unless Allen departed from his prepared remarks, what he actually said was that "commercial child pornography" overall "is a $20 billion industry worldwide, fueled by the Internet." Bad enough, but not quite the same thing — and what does "fueled by the Internet" mean in quantitative terms anyway?

But even with the clarification... $20 billion? Really?

Allen attributes the the figure to "a recent report by McKinsey Worldwide" — a report and organization unknown to either Google or Nexis (unless The Firm is branching out). I'm trying to track it down to see how that number was generated, because... $20 billion? Really? I can't disprove it yet, and, yes, I'm sure a lot of money goes into kiddie porn around the world, but the vibe is suspiciously similar to the common claim that America spends $10 billion on legal porn each year, a claim I've griped about before. Keep in mind that Allen was a source for the dubious Primetime Live story on American sex slaves.

Update: Apparently, the $20 billion figure has been out there for some time. It's frequently said to be the amount spent just on the Internet, and it's sometimes inflated to "$20-$30 billion." I have yet to find a verifiable attribution.

Update: A lead, perhaps. This summary of a 2004 report that I can't yet find says the report "refers to studies putting the annual market in child pornography on the Internet at almost 20 billion dollars, adding that paedophile images make up almost a quarter of the images downloaded from the Internet."

A quarter? Really?

Update: No, not really. Still haven't found the report, but here's a direct quote regarding that last figure: "Surveys in 2003 suggest that child pornography accounts for 24 percent of image searches in peer-to-peer applications." Note: P2P is not the entire Internet. "Image searches" isn't even close to the same thing as "images downloaded." It's entirely possible that people search more frequently for something that is harder to find. After all, you can find common files with one try, but you'd have to repeat your search over and over again for files that fewer people are sharing.

Update: Finally got a call back from NCMEC. The flack didn't have the actual report on hand, but she did tell me that it was put together by McKinsey Worldwide ("an Asian company") at the behest of an NCMEC board member. And the figures ($20B now rising to $30-$35B by 2009 -- think about that for a second) in it are based on information from the FBI and the Council of Europe. The CoE report is the 2004 one I referenced above, and as I noted they got the figure from someone else, so NCMEC is using third-hand information and attributing it to the second-hand source. Why? The flack had no idea. Who the CoE source is I don't know since the CoE web site only has a summary; the link to the actual report is dead. I did a quick search of the FBI site with no luck, but I'll try again. Oh by the way, the FBI lists NCMEC as a "partner"; According to Wikipedia (I know, I know) NCMEC gets $30 million a year from the Justice Dept. This is all looking a little, pardon the expression, incestuous.

Update: The plot thickens. After checking with the cybercrime department, FBI spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan refuses to comment on these figures. "That's NCMEC's number. I don't know where that number came from or how it was generated." I asked if that means that the number did not come from the FBI. Her very careful response: "I'm not saying that. I don't know if it came from the FBI. You'll have to talk to them." And I will. Again.

Update: The Wall Street Journal's Carl Bialik takes up the quest with similar lack of results. He does, however, get this (too-little too-late) promise from NCMEC: "If it is determined that this ends up not being a reliable statistic, NCMEC will stop citing McKinsey as the source and will also stop citing a specific number."

Update: The nail in to coffin from Bialik:

In a 2004 report, the Council of Europe, a Strasbourg, France-based human-rights watchdog, attributed the number to Unicef. But Allison Hickling, a spokeswoman for the United Nations child agency, told me in an email, "The number is not attributable to Unicef -- we do not collect data on this issue."

I told Alexander Seger, who worked on the Council of Europe reports, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Unicef, both cited in Council reports, said they weren't the source for the $20 billion figure. He said the Council won't use the number in the future, and added in an email, "I think we have what I would call a case of information laundering: You state a figure on something, somebody else quotes it, and then you and others [quote] it back, and thus it becomes clean and true. ... Perhaps this discussion will help instill more rigor in the future."

Perhaps...

Previously:
What the Times' original story on camwhores got right.

What an earlier report on online child porn got wrong.

How media fixation on sex slaves obscures the true nature of human trafficking.

How the religious right is redefining human trafficking to gut aid programs for consenting sex workers.

Why Peter Landesman is a giant bonehead, even if he does have — sheesh! — Oscar buzz [hat tip: Elon].

10:08 AM :: Comments (28)

Earlier this month, Primetime Live ran a segment on "thousands of young American girls who authorities say have been abducted or lured from their normal lives and made into sex slaves." That turns out to be 100 percent true: Authorities do say that. They say it a lot these days to excitable media outlets. But as investigative reporter Debbie Nathan points out in an important new exposé, "the claim is specious. To make it, you have to play with language and omit facts — or bend them so far that they break."

Nathan, you'll recall, is the woman who led the way in debunking the ritual sex abuse scare of the 1980s and who has been a friend of this site since she demolished a key section of Peter Landesman's notorious comedy of errors. Peter is name-checked in her new article as well, which I love because you just know he's got a Google alert for himself.

The Primetime segment tells two stories about, yep, Girls Next Door, who became sex slaves. Considering that there are supposedly thousands of these cases, you'd think that they could find two that are exactly what they purport to be, to wit: "many victims are no longer just runaways, or kids who've been abandoned. Many of them are from what would be considered 'good' families, who are lured or coerced by clever predators." And yet as Nathan reveals, neither of Primetime's poster girls are quite ready for framing. Here's Primetime on Girl #1:

Debbie's story is particularly chilling. One evening Debbie said she got a call from a casual friend, Bianca, who asked to stop by Debbie's house. Wearing a pair of Sponge Bob pajamas, Debbie went outside to meet Bianca, who drove up in a Cadillac with two older men, Mark and Matthew. After a few minutes of visiting, Bianca said they were going to leave. "So I went and I started to go give her a hug," Debbie told "Primetime." "And that's when she pushed me in the car."...Unbelievably, police say Debbie was kidnapped from her own driveway with her mother, Kersti, right inside. Back home with her other kids, Kersti had no idea Debbie wasn't there.

Unbelievably is right. Here's what Nathan found:

Phoenix Police Department press releases describe Debbie as a runaway. Police spokesman Andy Hill told me earlier this week that she was having problems with her family. She left home willingly with a friend, the girlfriend of a pimp, and a few hours later was herself dragooned into prostitution. Debbie's is a story of gross coercion, but clearly there's some background here. The vast majority of US kids who get involved with prostitution are runaways; this has been so for a very long time. That fact makes for yet another stale story. So it was left out of Primetime's because it didn't fit the boogie-man theme pushed these days when sex trafficking gets discussed -- in the media and lately by the feds as well.

Continue reading "Primetime Lies" »

9:14 AM :: Comments (3)

I approached today's front-page NY Times article on camwhores with trepidation — it being exactly the kind of story the paper has been getting wrong since the dawn of the Web.

From what I can tell, though, writer Kurt Eichenwald gets it exactly right. While no one with any web savvy will be very surprised by his findings, we haven't actually seen them reported out so thoroughly before, and that counts for a lot. The only thing I wondered about was this graf: "A six-month investigation by The New York Times into this corner of the Internet found that such sites had emerged largely without attracting the attention of law enforcement or youth protection organizations. While experts with these groups said they had witnessed a recent deluge of illicit, self-generated Webcam images, they had not known of the evolution of sites where minors sold images of themselves for money."

At first I thought it was odd that experts could be unfamiliar with teen cam sites — they must have better spam filters than I do. But it actually sas that they do know of them, just not of their "evolution." What that means, however, is left unclear.

That's a minor point, though. What I really want to say is that the most impressive element of this story is Eichenwald's online essay describing his reporting methods in detail, including red flags that were raised and how they were checked and rules that were bent and why. Regardless of whether you agree with the Times' decisions, the essay is a great step forward for transparency. Can you imagine how differently an article by, let's say, oh, Peter Landesman, would have been received if it had been accompanied by such a sidebar.

Continue reading "For those who don't share my personal obsession, feel free to substitute any article by Judy Miller" »

10:11 AM :: Comments (2)

Looks like I got back to the blog just in time to catch a major development in the Swift Boat Veter-- oh, who am I kidding? It's about Huckapoo! As if it wasn't enough that MetaFilter and Dumbrella have caught Huckapneumonia, today The New York Frickin' Times has a major feature on the band. My work here is done. (Note: To read the complete NYT story, click here.)

(Well, I probably ought to catch their first real concert, huh?)

The Times article is rich enough to satisfy just about anyone's Huckapoo jones, even mine. It's got backstories and quotes, ironies and aspirations, and the proper way to spell "Brittney." The only elided part is this:

Seven months ago, Huckapoo was but a concept in the mind of Brian Lukow, a producer who in the late 1990's helped create Dream Street, a boy band that was destined to be the next 'N Sync.

Dream Street's first record sold more than 750,000 copies, but the band broke up in 2002 after the boys' parents filed a lawsuit against Mr. Lukow and another producer. They accused them of creating an atmosphere harmful to minors, a claim that a judge ultimately found suspect.

An atmosphere harmful to minors? You betcha. Specifically, pornography. And even more specifically, an "adult sophisticated magazine" with the title -- wait for it -- "Just Come of Age."

Did somebody say best band ever?

[Update: In fairness to Lukow and his partner, I should make very clear that I eventually researched this accusation for a magazine article and found it to be wholly without merit.]

Update: So best!

From: "Brian Lukow" xxxxx@eProps.com
To: dradosh@yahoo.com
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 19:58:59 -0400

pretty funny stuff.
just curious..
which are the songs that are "much worse"

Brian J. Lukow
President
Entertainment Properties, LLC

Previous entries: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Continue reading "Just remember where you heard it first" »

3:52 PM :: Comments (5)

New York Times Public Editor Dan Okrent is apparently reviewing the evidence on Landesman. Today he refers readers to Jack Shafer's Slate columns and notes Gerry Marzorati's defense. I doubt he'll leave it at this, so watch for more from him soon.

I have a lot of respect for Okrent -- he initiated contact with me after my first post, which shows that if anything, he's going about his job a little too conscientiously. I don't for a minute think I have any insights that a dozen other readers hadn't already sent his way. So when he calls Marzorati's defense "comprehensive," I have to think he's being diplomatic. Marorati's a good guy -- he's edited my stuff in the past (on a very small scale) and responded in an exemplary fashion when he learned that Landesman had threatened to sue me (and "destroy" my career and a few other things). So let's be clear that I have no vendetta against the NYT Magazine whatsoever. Still, I found Gerry's defense to be inadequate -- not because it is unpersuasive, but because it is beside the point. His argument basically amounts to, Well, we never said it was all true.

To illustrate what I mean, I'm going to go back to the detail I started with, the slave auction web site. This is an important element in the story for two reasons: it's the single most dramatic thing Landesman witnesses firsthand in the United States, and it's the most newsworthy part of the story. The existence of sex slaves in the US has been well-documented. (Some of my visitors continue to send me articles about police raids, apparently thinking this backs up Landesman. I think it does the opposite. A responsible story on the subject would have been precisely such a roundup of known instances of domestic sex trafficking. Landesman, on the other hand, wrote an exposé that exposes no new cases). But people being sold on the Internet -- in any context -- has never been reported anywhere outside the Weekly World News. If the site is real, that alone is front page news. But Marzorati seems alarmingly incurious about it. Here's his entire comment on the matter:

The web site where the slave appeared to be auctioned: It exists, I know the name of the site, and we decided not to print the name on the grounds of taste and ethics. Was it real? The special Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent thought it looked real. Landesman wrote 'supposedly' Many times throughout the article Landesman carefully hedged his statements with qualifiers, but you seem to understand that the use of qualifiers is not to show care but rather to create vagueness.

What's more, in Marzorati's recasting, he reverses the order of the qualifiers in a way that makes Landesman appear more conservative: the agent thinks it looks real, but Landesman said supposedly. Here's how Landesman wrote it originally:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., are finding that when it comes to sex, what was once considered abnormal is now the norm. They are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. ''We've become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit,'' says I.C.E. Special Agent Perry Woo. Cybernetworks like KaZaA and Morpheus / through which you can download and trade images and videos -- have become the Mexican border of virtual sexual exploitation. I had heard of one Web site that supposedly offered sex slaves for purchase to individuals. The I.C.E. agents hadn't heard of it. Special Agent Don Daufenbach, I.C.E.'s manager for undercover operations, brought it up on a screen. A hush came over the room as the agents leaned forward, clearly disturbed. ''That sure looks like the real thing,'' Daufenbach said. There were streams of Web pages of thumbnail images of young women of every ethnicity in obvious distress, bound, gagged, contorted. The agents in the room pointed out probable injuries from torture. Cyberauctions for some of the women were in progress; one had exceeded $300,000. ''With new Internet technology,'' Woo said, ''pornography is becoming more pervasive. With Web cams we're seeing more live molestation of children.'' One of I.C.E.'s recent successes, Operation Hamlet, broke up a ring of adults who traded images and videos of themselves forcing sex on their own young children.

Ignore this time the sleight-of-hand (yes, I know I didn't use spell-check last time; enough already) that gets us from "harder-core pornography" to sex slaves to Operation Hamlet. What I want to point out is that in Landesman's chronology, "supposedly" comes only before he's even seen the site; if he's withholding judgment it's because, he strongly implies, he hasn't even looked at it until he gets to ICE. Once he calls it up, doubt fades and we get instead, "this sure looks like the real thing" (He does not say, for instance, "Cyberauctions for some of the women appeared to be in progress.")

If Marzorati says the site exists, I believe him, though I wish he'd said that he'd seen it, not just that he knows its name. Earlier I pointed out the misuse of the word "streams" in this paragraph (Web pages load; audio and video stream). That's a minor point, perhaps, but it doesn't inspire confidence that this section was vetted by someone with the savvy it requires. It's clear (both from his article and his personal communications with me) that Landesman dislikes the Internet (why "cyberauctions" rather than "auctions"?) so it's possible his perception is skewed. Here are just a few questions that a responsible reporter would have raised and answered. I'm not saying there aren't perfectly reasonable answers, but it is unthinkable that the article left them out:

How did Landesman hear of the site? Not, apparently, from the ICE -- from a victim? A user? A web search? (Google "sex slave auction" and you won't find anything authentic.) A message board? Is his source reliable? Is this site connected, other than "in spirit," to the trafficking that he investigates overseas? If not, how did he come upon it? On what basis does Daufenbach say the site looks real? In the story, it appears to be his first impression; does he or anyone else investigate further? Is he saying the auctions look real or just the photos? If the auctions, why does he think that? Is there a mechanism set up for payment and delivery? Do they take credit cards? Pay Pal?? Where and to whom is the site registered? Is it available to anyone or is it password protected and if so, how does one get the password?

I focused on this web site because, as I said, it's important, and also because I know more about the Internet than anything else Landesman discusses, so I know what questions to raise. But there are many, many passages in the article that could be attacked the same way. A few correspondents seem to think that my problem with Landesman's piece is simply, "I've never heard of it and I don't want to believe it so it can't be true." Nonsense. My problem is that in breathlessly spinning an elaborate tale, he is too skimpy with evidence that any reasonable reader has a right to expect.

Oddball update.

8:49 PM

[Update, May 4, 2004: Between January and April, I posted 17 items about the New York Times Magazine article The Girls Next Door. Some of my archive links got corrupted when I moved this site off Blogspot, but you can use this page of search results as an index to the entire saga. Start from the bottom.]

[Note: The original heading for this post was "More Glass Shattering?" because, as you'll see, that's the question that was originally posed to me. I thought it was clear that I very quickly answered that specific question negatively. Obviously it wasn't, however, because a number of people have chastised me for comparing Peter Landesman with Stephen Glass. To the extent that my headline did briefly raise such a comparison in people's minds, I regret that. For this reason, I've changed it. Whatever problems Landesman's article has, I don't think any of it was fabricated and I shouldn't have implied such a thing.]

Chris Tennant just e-mailed me about Peter Landesman's cover story in today's New York Times magazine: "I smell a rat. Suburban basements filled with rentable toddlers? Wouldn't at least one of these places have been busted by now? [Update: The article does open with an account of one place that was busted, but Chris's concerns are still valid; it would help if there was more information from court or police records about that bust in this article] The most glaring "too-good-to-be-true" Glass-ian touch was the following, about some web site that features 'live auctions' of sex slaves. I spend about 15-hours a day online and have never heard of such a thing. Am I being naive to the true depravity of my fellow man? Or is Landesman completely full of shit?"

Here's the passage Chris is referring to: "I had heard of one Web site that supposedly offered sex slaves for purchase to individuals. The I.C.E. agents hadn't heard of it. Special Agent Don Daufenbach, I.C.E.'s manager for undercover operations, brought it up on a screen. A hush came over the room as the agents leaned forward, clearly disturbed. ''That sure looks like the real thing,'' Daufenbach said. There were streams of Web pages of thumbnail images of young women of every ethnicity in obvious distress, bound, gagged, contorted. The agents in the room pointed out probable injuries from torture. Cyberauctions for some of the women were in progress; one had exceeded $300,000. ''With new Internet technology,'' Woo said, ''pornography is becoming more pervasive. With Web cams we're seeing more live molestation of children.'' One of I.C.E.'s recent successes, Operation Hamlet, broke up a ring of adults who traded images and videos of themselves forcing sex on their own young children."

A few things are setting off alarm bells for me here. First, there's the whole Internet=scary trope, which is so 1997. Hell, his improper use of the word "streams" tells you he's not comfortable with the technology. And then the conflation of ordinary kiddie porn (bad enough) with this slave trade thing just seems like slight-of-hand. Like if you've vaguely heard of Operation Hamlet, you're going to think, Well that was real, so the rest of it must be too.

I'm not ready to accuse a respected journalist of anything just yet. But Chris and I are going over this article with a fine-tooth comb. You should too, and post your findings on your own blog (let me know if you do) or send me your tips for this one.... Small update: Lots of people are sending me lots of interesting e-mails, both echoing my concerns and challenging them. I hope soon to post many of them, but for now I have to take a bit of a break.

Third update: After writing the first and second updates (below) I've decided that we were too quick to invoke Stephen Glass. This doesn't appear to be a fraud or a problem of such proportion. However, the article does raise a few serious (if you care about journalism) questions:

1) Did Landesman exaggerate the scope of a real but small problem? Are his most serious charges supported by his evidence?

2) Should he have been more skeptical of outlandish stories told to him by dubious sources? What attempts did he make to verify these stories?

3) Is the story tainted by misunderstanding and fear of the Internet? (The site mentioned above is the most horrifying and unlikely thing that Landesman witnesses first-hand. If it exists at all, is it genuine (not just a fairly common fetish fantasy site)? Did he make any attempts to track down its origin? Did his editors confirm its authenticity?)

First update: The article seems to be, at best, a mountain of circumstantial evidence. Try this when you read it:

1) Separate out all the stuff about something other than sex-slave rings in the United Staes -- international trafficking, prostitution, child pornography. There's a lot of sordid material that lends ambience to the story without actually backing up the main claim, that there are up to 50,000 sex slaves in captivity in the US. Frequently, gears are shifted without warning. Typical example that caught my eye because it's so familiar: "Cybernetworks like KaZaA and Morpheus -- through which you can download and trade images and videos -- have become the Mexican border of virtual sexual exploitation. I had heard of one Web site that supposedly offered sex slaves for purchase to individuals." How many tech-unsavvy NYT readers don't know that that's a complete non-sequitor?

2) Pay attention to the instances in which a moderated quote from a government source is paired with an extreme one from someone at Free the Slaves or another advocacy group, as if the former is bolstering the latter.

3) Notice that the most salacious charges (and make no mistake, from the cover photo on, this is a disturbingly prurient article) come entirely single-sourced by anonymous young women. At one point Landesman writes, "All the girls I spoke to said that their captors were both psychologically and physically abusive," implying that there are many. But throughout the article he identifies only two ("Andrea" and "Montserrat") and never mentions speaking to any others on background. Considering that much of their stories are so literally fantastic (girls being dressed in color-coded outfits for open trade at Disneyland; Johns who read the Bible to girls before raping them) you'd think he, or the editors, would want some confirmation.

4) Notice finally that after following this story for months, and pointing out that sex slave rings have to operate somewhat in the open to attract customers, Landesman never witnesses any slavery first-hand. Sure he "visited a number of addresses where trafficked girls and young women have reportedly ended up," but always after the alleged rings were broken up. Then there's this graf, in which I've emphasized some suspicious wording:

A neat subdivision and cycling path ran along the opposite bank. The San Luis Rey was mostly dry, filled now with an impenetrable jungle of 15-foot-high bamboolike reeds. As [San Diego sheriff's deputy Rick] Castro and I started down a well-worn path into the thicket, he told me about the time he first heard about this place, in October 2001. A local health care worker had heard rumors about Mexican immigrants using the reeds for sex and came down to offer condoms and advice. She found more than 400 men and 50 young women between 12 and 15 dressed in tight clothing and high heels. There was a separate group of a dozen girls no more than 11 or 12 wearing white communion dresses. ''The girls huddled in a circle for protection,'' Castro told me, ''and had big eyes like terrified deer.''

I followed Castro into the riverbed, and only 50 yards from the road we found a confounding warren of more than 30 roomlike caves carved into the reeds. It was a sunny morning, but the light in there was refracted, dreary and basementlike. The ground in each was a squalid nest of mud, tamped leaves, condom wrappers, clumps of toilet paper and magazines. Soiled underwear was strewn here and there, plastic garbage bags jury-rigged through the reeds in lieu of walls. One of the caves' inhabitants had hung old CD's on the tips of branches, like Christmas ornaments. It looked vaguely like a recent massacre site. It was 8 in the morning, but the girls could begin arriving any minute. Castro told me how it works: the girls are dropped off at the ballfield, then herded through a drainage sluice under the road into the riverbed. Vans shuttle the men from a 7-Eleven a mile away. The girls are forced to turn 15 tricks in five hours in the mud. The johns pay $15 and get 10 minutes.

That's very dramatic, but note his sourcing: a cop who heard it from a social worker. Landesman says the deputy "told me how it works," but what he really means is the deputy told me how the social worker told him how it works. Couldn't Landesman even talk to the social worker to get it second-hand rather than third-hand? Even better, couldn't he wait a few minutes (or days, if necessary) to see if the girls actually did show up and get the story first-hand? That's what ultimately makes this so hinky for me: if a trained investigative reporter can't get closer than one, two, or three steps removed from these alleged sex slaves, how are the johns finding them?

Second update: Landesman on CNN. "And let me throw you one more address that I couldn't get into the story for legal reasons. But try the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the East 80s, a brownstone nine blocks from where my parents live, actually."

Click for Fourth update.

3:53 PM

I won't be surprised if Bush tries it out as his next lame rationale for the war on Iraq. For now we'll settle for the RIAA saying that it's not just trying to stop music sharing — it wants to protect the kids. A pedophile could send "an instant message to the unwitting young person who downloads an Olsen twins or Pokemon file from the pedophile's share folder on Kazaa," RIAA chief Cary Sherman said, sexing up, just a bit, a GAO report. (It said that some files with those keywords were actually porn -- more on that shortly -- not that pedophiles were IM'ing people who searched for them).

Now for a couple of oddities within the GAO report. Here's the The New York Times paraphrase:

A study in March by the General Accounting Office found that KaZaA would be effective for someone looking for child pornography. The agency searched for 12 terms associated with child pornography, such as "incest" and "underage." It did not actually download the files it found, but it determined that 42 percent of them had titles or descriptions associated with pornographic images of children.

So, my first reaction was, They didn't download the files? That means they didn't learn anything, since everyone knows that porn-spammers spice up their files names with keywords that have nothing to do with the actual images. Then I re-read the paragraph and realized that what the GAO was saying is that even when you go out of your way to look for kiddy porn, less than half of the results will even have "titles or descriptions associated with pornographic images of children," much less actually BE pornographic images of children. WTF? I mean, when you use "incest" or "underage" as a search term, shouldn't 100 percent of the results contain those search terms, even if the file name is ultimately inaccurate? Unless the Times just got this wrong, KaZaA's search function is seriously flawed (or are there that many non-porn images that are accurately described with such words? If so, what would they be of?).

Now an interlude from another paraphrase of this report:

The GAO's auditors chose not to open them because under federal law, it is illegal to knowingly possess child pornography...The auditors did, however, ask the U.S. Customs' CyberSmuggling Center to test a smaller number of images found using three keywords related to child pornography. "The CyberSmuggling Center analysis of the 341 downloaded images showed that 149 (about 44 percent) of the downloaded images contained child pornography," the report says. "The center classified the remaining images as child erotica (13 percent), adult pornography (29 percent), or non-pornographic (14 percent)."

That seems to be a significantly higher percentage of ACTUAL kid-porn than the GAO's own test would have turned up, had they followed through. BTW, I wonder if, say, Trent Lott knows that the U.S. Customs office is being paid to parse the difference between "child pornography" and "child erotica."

Back to the Times:

A second aspect of its study measured the likelihood a child would inadvertently be exposed to pornography using KaZaA. It examined 157 files downloaded in response to three search terms of interest to children — Britney, Pokémon and Olsen twins. It classified 49 percent of those files as pornographic.

OK, that's a little creepy, though I'm curious how those 77 hits break down (Britney 72, Olsen twins 5, Pokémon, 0?). That seems like pertinent information. Also, the paraphrase makes it sound like kids looking for Britney Spears MP3s might stumble onto porn, when it's likely that the GAO singled out image files (or it would have had a much lower "success rate") (Update:Daze points out that MSNBC states outright that hardcore porn is "finding its way into music files.") Anyway, here's News.com again with the CyberSmuggling Center's similar test:

Of the 177 images the CyberSmuggling Center downloaded from Kazaa using "three keywords representing the names of a popular female singer, child actors and a cartoon character," it classified only two as falling into the category of child pornography. The remainder would be legal to possess--and legal to distribute assuming they did not violate other restrictions such as obscenity or copyright laws..

Only two? That's a huge difference (and it's one reason you won't see the C3 version of this test reported very often). Update: Ah, I wasn't reading closely enough. The Times (following the GAO's lead?) switched gears without warning, jumping from child pornography to the ordinary variety in successive paragraphs. I blame the media for my confusion.

In summary, if you're looking for fake nudie pics of Mary Kate and Ashley, the GAO is gonna do a much better job of finding them for you than the CyberSmuggling Center. I wonder how much that study cost....

11:15 PM

The Persecution of Pee-wee Herman. In this must-read article, Richard Goldstein makes a persuasive case that the child pornography arrest of Paul Reubens is not just another celebrity scandal, or another case of an overzealous prosecutor spinning nonsense into headlines (though it's that as well). Reubens, see, is a serious collector of vintage physique magazines — which infrequently contained photos of teenagers that were legal at the time, but no longer.

Why should this matter to anyone other than Reubens? Goldstein writes: "Vintage gay erotica, some of it going back a century, is taken very seriously by scholars who regard such pieces as artifacts of homosexual history. These images show the continuity of queer desire, and that's important to a community whose past is a story long suppressed. Dozens of gay archives have opened in the past decade, and the thought that they might be subject to police surveillance raises a fearsome specter. Several archivists, speaking off the record because they were terrified of drawing attention from the police, admitted that they had never examined each image in their files. Cleansing a historic collection by destroying images that are now provocative is repugnant to these scholars."

7:15 PM