Eagle-eyed readers of the New York Times may notice today that the paper is running a correction to my article on The Beatles: Rock Band.

An article on Sunday about a new video game, Beatles: Rock Band, misattributed a comment about dreams from the book “Grapefruit,” by Yoko Ono, which compared the interactive nature of the video game to the book’s theme that art gains by being shared. It was a line within the book itself, written by Ms. Ono; it was not a blurb written for the book by John Lennon.

That this is a common mistake and, frankly, an understandable one does not make it excusable. I was alerted to my error after seeing a blogger complain about it. I contacted her for more information, checked it out further, and then let the magazine know we needed to fix it, both for accuracy and because Yoko already gets too little credit (and too much blame) as it is. That I contributed to that narrative at all is the most upsetting part to me.

I call your attention to all of this not because I'm happy that I made a mistake, of course, but rather because I know some of my readers are still confused about the proper way to respond when a blogger points out an error in your New York Times magazine cover story.

(Hmm, would it be more fun if this gets caught by his narcissistic Google Alert? Yeah, I guess so. Peter Landesman.)

8:40 AM :: Comments (9)

It's been seven months since I've mentioned Peter Landesman even in passing, nearly a year and a half since I wrote anything substantive about the man and three whole years since my last sustained blogging about his work. As far as I'm concerned, he's more gone and forgotten than an ex-Clique Girl.

But Landesman has never let go. He's been holed up in his cave, licking wounds, nursing grudges, waiting for the right moment to exact his revenge. And now he thinks he's found it. Yesterday he sent me (and Jack Shafer and Debbie Nathan) the following e-mail regarding a recent underage prostitution sting.

Dear Radosh,

Though many moons and stories have passed since our last correspondence, this was sent to me a couple days ago and I thought you'd be interested in seeing this. Much has happened in the last few years to support the thesis of the story, that sex trafficking in general - and the trafficking for sex of minors - is a serious and misunderstood problem in the US. But this operation appears to be the last necessary confirmation. 

Sunlight remains the best disinfectant. Even more so in the world of so-called media criticism. The good news for you is that it still costs nothing, both economically and in reporting time, to simply decide that one knows something to be true (or untrue), and to upload it. (Not that that has anything to do with reality.)

Best,

Peter Landesman

"Many moons and stories," indeed. It's no wonder you're in such demand as a Hollywood screenwriter. Well, you're certainly correct that it will cost me little effort to respond to this. For the sake of argument, let's agree that the thesis of your New York Times magazine article really was that "sex trafficking in general - and the trafficking for sex of minors - is a serious and misunderstood problem in the US." So... why are you telling me this? From the beginning I've made clear that "No one is saying sex slavery isn't a genuine problem" What I questioned was not your thesis but your facts and your presentation of them. My interest in this matter has never been sex trafficking but journalism — something you obviously haven't gotten any better at if you think the article you sent is at all relevant to our previous debate.

On some level, of course, you must know that the criticisms of your article are valid or you would not still, after all this time, be looking desperately for scraps of retroactive fact-checking to shore it up. Sadly, you'll have to keep searching. This report of sad but ordinary teenage prostitution has little to do with your lurid tales of child slavery, murder and perversion. The girls rescued this week were not kidnapped, broken in bizarre rituals and traded at Disneyland. As the FBI's Daniel Roberts says, "the vast majority of these kids are what they term 'throwaway kids,' with no family support, no friends." There are no big brothers undertaking dramatic rescue missions. Indeed, "throwaway" is a term I first encountered in an article by Debbie Nathan specifically refuting the perception of the sex trade caused by articles like yours.

The truth is, at the time you wrote your article, the prostitution rings busted this week would not even have been considered sex traffic in legal terms. That designation is the result of a 2007 law that expanded the definition of trafficking to cover not just the kind of international smuggling you wrote about but virtually all underage prostitution. Cynics say the expansion was necessary in part because after all the money the Justice Department threw at sex trafficking around the time your story came out, they simply weren't finding the tens of thousands of victims they expected. Maybe the change in the law was good, maybe it wasn't. Like you, I haven't looked into it enough to know.

But let's not get into that, shall we. I have no wish to reengage with you at all, but if we must, let it be over the unfinished business of your original article rather than any extraneous new developments. I have no reason to think you actually want to defend your work so I won't bother listing all the still unresolved questions about it. But just in case, I will start with one very, very easy one. Here's a paragraph from your article:

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 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.''

It has since been conclusively proven that this scene never took place (according to the local health care worker herself). The girls, the communion dresses, the big eyes — they did not exist. And you could have found that out with a single phone call and a shred of journalistic skepticism. You want disinfectant, Peter? Please explain why you think that paragraph belonged in print, and if it did not, call the New York Times and request a correction. Until then we have nothing to talk about.

On the remote chance, however, that you are unable to keep your mouth shut, I request that all future communications take place in public, on this blog. No more personal contact. Ever.

11:03 AM :: Comments (8)

Jurors deliberated less than five minutes before returning guilty verdicts in the trials of the first two defendants, who were accused of grooming the kids for sex shows in "kindergarten" classes and passing off Vicodin as "silly pills" to help the children perform. [The five-year-olds] were trained to perform in front of an audience of 50 to 100 once a week.

Then they took a hot air balloon to the moon and were sodomized by Chuck Norris.

The trial of a third defendant was delayed after it came out that two reporters covering the case had been sleeping with the prosecutor.

1:26 PM :: Comments (5)

Now that I've got your attention, let me offer you Free Pornography. More precisely, a free copy of Debbie Nathan's new book, Pornography, which will be the prize in next week's anti-caption contest.

Debbie is a friend of the site since back in the Landesman era and more recently the gadfly who took down Kurt Eichenwald. Pornography: A Groundwork Guide is "the first and only book about pornography for young adults of high school and undergrad college age." It "summarizes the latest scholarly research about porn and makes it easy to understand."

When you think about it, this is actually an incredibly valuable resource. If you're a high school or college student looking to write a paper on this topic, you can't exactly Google "pornography" and expect to get any usable results (or any work done). Without this book, your only option would be to turn to one of the sensationalist and unreliable anti-porn advocacy groups or, if you're particularly enterprising, a porn industry apologist group, which is likely to be equally unreliable. Nathan's book is not pro-porn but, I would say, anti-anti-porn, though it fairly presents arguments from all sides.

Really any one of any age who's interested in the topic is likely to find it useful, but since it's meant for teens, feel free to give your copy away if you win it in the contest. The best way to do this is to log into a teen chat room and ask if there are any 15 year olds who want free pornography.

10:18 AM :: Comments (5)

A couple of my TV writer friends wrote to alert me that Peter Landesman has come out against the strike. The intricacies of the labor politics are over my head here, but the tone of the post is unmistakably Landesmanesque — right down to the hatred of all things bloggy. The familiar overwritten assholitry is as entertaining as ever, even if you don't really know or care what he's talking about. As another thread commenter observes, "Weird how some posts read as if they were rehearsed in a mirror first."

Even without all the anti-union stuff, this sentence alone makes it a worthwhile read: "Let’s face it, our favorite people are the characters we create on the page."

You'd better hope they love you back, Peter, because every real person in Hollywood now thinks you're a douche.

2:28 PM :: Comments (1)

From late 2004 until at least a few months ago, doing a Google search for Huckapoo would return a link to my exhaustive (and exhausting!) coverage of that band somewhere in the top five results (the exact position alternating with the band's official site, its MySpace page, Wikipedia entry and my New York magazine feature).

Today I discovered that my Huckapoo coverage has been demoted to result number 603. That's right: there are 602 better sources of information about Huckapoo on the internets than Radosh.net, including Les artistes dont la premiere lettre est H.

Now, the upside of scrolling through seven pages of Huckapoo results is that I discovered the previously hidden photographic gem above (see two more from the set here). But the downside is, what the fuck happened over at Google?

Seriously, someone with some tech savvy needs to explain to me why or how my site has been blacklisted as a source for Huckapoo information — which surely someone other than me still looks for now and then.

Clues to this mystery after the jump.

Continue reading "It's a Huckanspiracy!" »

1:37 PM :: Comments (15)

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)

The Washington Post leaves a burning sack of shit on Peter Landesman's doorstep.

Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence

President Bush has blanketed the nation with 42 Justice Department task forces and spent more than $150 million -- all to find and help the estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of forced prostitution or labor in the United States.

But the government couldn't find them. Not in this country...

The administration has identified 1,362 victims of human trafficking brought into the United States since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 a year the government had estimated.

6:08 PM :: Comments (2)

14 American Apparel Models Freed In Daring Midnight Raid

The models, who range in age from 18 to 22 but appear to be 12 to 14, were taken to an emergency safehouse where they were given food, clothing, and access to soap. Officials said they were conducting tests to determine whether the girls were subjected to brainwashing during their captivity.

"I thought it would never end," said Fiara, a Brazilian-Finnish brunette who was held in an empty white room for weeks in nothing but Lycra tights and a halter top. "I can't believe how good it feels to wear something that buttons again."

3:19 PM :: Comments (0)

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)

I'm not talking about last night's snowfall, lovely though it was. I'm talking about the gift that will apparently keep on giving: reviews for Peter Landesman's Trade. Here's my auto-summary of Variety.

Little more than a slipshod, trashy, sometimes exploitative thriller... fear-mongering... Troubling signs are as immediate as the opening credits... ghoulish... nasty... sordid sensationalism... gaping holes in logic... undercuts its own worst tendencies for stoking fear and paranoia by letting auds off the hook with at least four happy endings... sleaze.

Well at least it's faithful to the source material.

8:59 PM :: Comments (2)

Time now to dust off the "where are they now" file for a look at recent developments in the career of Peter Landesman, award-winning, basement apartment-leaving journalist.

When we last left off, production was underway on the movie version of The Girls Next Door. Two things have changed since then: Milla Jovovich has dropped out and the title has been changed to Trade. Apparently, someone in marketing had the perfect answer — alliteration! — to the question, "How can we fool audiences into thinking this movie will be just like Traffic." Also, there's a nascent web site and a catchy tag line: "Every year, more than 1,000,000 people are trafficked [!] across international borders... against their will." I guess if your story is "not about numbers" (in which case, the tag line, like the cover line before it, is the best place to put them), then it doesn't matter if you just make those numbers up. The film's figure is inflated by 200,000 to 400,000 over the already inflated State Department numbers. I wonder why they didn't go with "Every year, perhaps as many as 15,000 people are trafficked into the United States, mostly to work in farms or sweatshops, but at least some, maybe even half, in brothels"? What, doesn't grab you?

Anyway, the film debuted at Sundance this week, and The Hollywood Reporter has the first review. Here's an excerpt.

A lackluster lump... generic... humdrum... lumbers... leaden... drab... uninspired... slow-footed... "important" [scare quotes theirs]... further slowed... tentative... lackluster... dreary and listless... sloppy cutesiness... [unfavorable comparison to] Walker Texas Ranger.

10:11 AM :: Comments (2)

In part two of our two-part series on The New York Times' two-part series on online pedophilia, we look at an article headlined On the Web, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach.

Unlike the first installment, which raised a few questions but was not terribly objectionable, this one is a stinker. Again, I'm not saying it's Landesmanesque or anything. It's merely another in a long line of breathless, overhyped, underanalyzed stories fed mostly be a pathological fear of the Internet. I've been pissing and moaning about this genre for nearly ten years and not much has changed.

The tip off comes early on when Eichenwald refers to online activity as "chatter in the ether." Ooh, ether! Mysterious! Primordial! This may seem like a small thing, but these turns of phrase reflect a fundamental discomfort with the Internets that color everything in the article. After all, when was the last time you saw a newspaper refer to a phone call or radio show as "chatter in the ether"?

The premise of this article is that the pedophilia community (did I really just write that?) "uses the virtual world to advance its interests in the real one." In practice that means lumping together three distinct types of activity so that they enhance one another in the reader's mind, the scary (but infeffectual) ideas making the other parts more scary by association, and the effective (but less scary) ideas making the scarier parts sound more effective.

The three activities, in descending order of seriousness, are:
• Using the Internet to gain physical access to children
• Using the Internet to justify sexual feelings for children, thus allowing pedophiles to cross the line from thought into action (The Times's experts call this "the most dangerous element," but I think my ranking makes more sense)
• Using the Internet to promote societal acceptance of pedophilia

Let's take these one at at time.

Continue reading "Pedophilia vs. Webophobia" »

9:41 PM :: Comments (10)

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)

Now it's the General Accounting Office that's objectively pro sex slave.

6:38 PM :: Comments (1)

I got a call the other evening from a pollster for Hillary Clinton's senate campaign. I've always been a firm believer in participating in genuine political polls on the grounds that it's the only real way to influence the political scene (unlike, say, blogging. Or voting). Now I'm not so sure. After 15 minutes of answering the nice lady's questions, I don't think I was able to give even the slightest hint of what I believe about Hillary Clinton. If anything, I unintentionally, but unavoidably, misled her (or rather, the people who will read her data).

The bulk of the poll was seeking my reaction to a series of statements such as you might hear in a campaign ad or stump speech. I'd be told positive or negative things about Hillary or her opponent (almost always presumed to be John Spencer but once or twice Kathleen McFarland) and asked whether they made my opinion of each "much more favorable, somewhat more favorable, somewhat less favorable, or much less favorable." Here's where the problems began.

First of all, after volunteering, for several statements, that they did not change my opinon (because, for instance, I already knew the information) I was eventually told that I could no longer say that and must choose one of the four options. If I declined, my opinion would not be registered. I can only assume that the rules didn't change halfway through and that my initial responses were all tossed out, which I either should have been told from the start or not at all. But while that's a flaw that could easily have been remedied, there was a more intrinsic one that is the result of not allowing me to explain WHY I answered the way I did.

For instance, when being fed a line of bullshit about how Hillary is bravely fighting the White House over the Iraq war by pushing for more body armor or what not, I said it made me much less favorable — not because of the value of the positions, but because Hillary would have some fucking nerve trying to run on that line of bullshit after her craven support for the war. Now it's true the pollsters get the limited information that this ad campaign will not be effective with me, but they won't know why (unless they have good focus groups). At least I did get to make it clear that Hillary's offensive anti-videogame crusade is a turnoff.

Update: Forgot this nugget: One question was specifically about how I'd feel if Hillary gave a speech on subjects A, B, or C. They all sounded like fine speeches, but for each I had to honestly answer that they would make me much less favorable toward her because if she actually delivered them it would only confirm my opinion of Clinton as a politician who can't even give a policy speech without first testing to see how it polls. Yeah, I know that's SOP for every politician, but every politician didn't call me up.

I also got to make it clear that I will not be voting for Clinton under any circumstances, although they never did ask the one question that might give me pause (what if she were in danger of actually losing?) and which might reveal to them that the main reason I won't vote for her is that I don't want to encourage her to run in 2008. Still, it was borderline insulting of them to phrase the question as, "Do you think Hillary Clinton deserves another term or is it time to give someone else a try." This isn't about giving somebody a try, it's about finding the best person for the job.

Which is why I was also bummed that even though the very first question was how likely I am to vote in the Democratic primary (very), every question that followed was about the general election and assumed that Hillary would be the candidate. OK, that's a reasonable assumption, but I would very much like to have told the pollsters that I will be voting in the primary for Jonathan Tasini. I mean, I know my vote won't make a difference, barely even as a protest. But endorsing him in a poll of a few hundred people WOULD register. It might make Clinton really understand why she's lost progressives. Which might in turn make her wonder whether she can really count on her supposed base in 2008. As it is, all she learned is that it's going to be really easy to run negative ads against John Spencer, once people realize he's not the dead guy from The West Wing.

The other flaw in these polls, of course, is that respondants lie. For instance, in an apparent effort to weed out people who might actually know anything about the candidate, I was asked if I work in journalism. I said no, figuring that Peter Landesman would back me up on that.

2:42 PM :: Comments (9)

A month ago I commented somewhat harshly (I believe the word "douchebag" was used) about a Mr. Boykin Curry, the subject of a New Yorker profile. How, I wondered, could a savvy writer like Ben McGrath be charmed by someone like Curry (if in fact he was)?

The obvious answer may have been staring us in the face the whole time: Boykin Curry is a charming guy! How do I know? Because he's just written a reply to my post, and unlike some folks who respond to bloggy criticism with threats and foot-stomping, Curry politely offers a couple of corrections and clarifications, leavened with self-deprecation. In my book, that counts as charming! Plus, he even invites "some" of us to come down and see Playa Grande for ourselves. (No dentists or fatties.)

2:37 PM :: Comments (12)

Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr died today at age 81. Coffin was the first person I ever interviewed, as a 14-year-old aspiring journalist for New Youth Connections. I was already a committed peacenik by then (more so than now), so much of what he had to say wasn't new to me and didn't stick in my memory. But he made an impression when he talked to me about "the sin of pride." A child of the Free to Be, You and Me self-esteem age, I had never really been told that there is such a thing as being full of yourself. No doubt his obituaries will highlight other accomplishments, but I'll always recall him as the man who helped me get my start as the greatest journalist of my generation. After Peter Landesman.

"The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love."

6:07 PM :: Comments (6)

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)

Of the many weird aspects to the story of Tanya Nicole Kach, the young woman who (we're led to believe) spent 10 years in psychological captivity to the man who seduced her at age 14, somehow I fixated on the detail that one of the charges against Thomas Hose is "involuntary deviate sexual intercourse." I mean, I understand why doing it up the butt is deviate, but can you commit that crime involuntarily? Did he, like, slip?

No, it turns out that unlike, say, involuntary manslaughter, the modifier in this case refers to the victim's participation in the act. According to Pennsylvania penal code, deviate sexual intercourse is defined as "Sexual intercourse per os or per anus between human beings and any form of sexual intercourse with an animal. The term also includes penetration, however slight, of the genitals or anus of another person with a foreign object for any purpose other than good faith medical, hygienic or law enforcement procedures." The law against voluntary deviate sexual intercourse has been repealed (so you won't have to use your "but I'm a doctor" defense), but seven criteria can render DSI involuntary, including a victim "who is less than 16 years of age and the person [charged] is four or more years older."

I learned all this from ageofconsent.com. Oh, great. Now I'll have to go and choose a whole new domain name for my Huckapoo fan site.

11:07 AM :: Comments (0)