Partial Analysis of Media Bias
As many a netizen can tell you, numerous articles one can read which talk about computers, computer networks, 'Cyberspace', the Internet, or the 'Information Superhighway', portray the on-line world as a difficult, dangerous, pointless, and even wasteful enterprise. Outside the computer industry, many members of the print media are clearly biased against the Internet. This bias is expressed in many ways. The most popular argument is the 'danger' that the Internet poses to children. The supposed proliferation of pornography and lurking pedophiles is mentioned with increasing frequency. This misguided focus reached its apex with an article in Time magazine, which deceived the public by presenting a distorted view of the unrestricted access to on-line pornography, and fueled the already raging conflagration of debate over censorship of the Internet.
Many print journals downplay the importance and usefulness of the Internet. For example, in an article in Newsweek, Clifford Stoll says that the Internet is nothing but "an ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data." He further insists that computer-aided education is a waste; that educational computers are "expensive toys" which are "difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training"(Stoll)
Beyond the utilitarian argument, many complain of "how ugly things can get on the Internet."(Parsons) They refer, of course, to the supposedly common availability of pornography, and the constant danger of pedophiles. The Chicago Tribune says that "there has been an increasing use of services such as America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, and the Internet's World Wide Web to lure adolescents into relationships and sometimes personal encounters with sexual predators." It is also often mentioned that those same services are used for the distribution of pornography.(Schodolski) Due to "a few high-profiles cases of adult literature and pictures on the Internet," there is now a strong push in congress to censor the 'Net. (Parsons; Meeks)
Often, an article will single out one new feature or service, and go on about how it will make it easier for pornography or pedophilia to reach "into the living rooms of America." For example, America Online recently introduced a function called Filegrabber that allows images to be decoded and viewed as they are received. This would cut out the intermediate steps of manually decoding, and opening a viewer. In an article discussing this new feature, James Coates says that this will make it easier for non-technical types, including children, to obtain pornographic images. (Coates)
Rarely is it mentioned that "the path to prurience on the Net often ends with a '404 Not Found' or a '403 Forbidden,' as any seasoned sex surfer will tell you." Small, private-owned pornography sites are rarely reliable or easy to find. "Imagine the disappointment of visitors to Girls of Internet when they discover the site just promotes a phone-sex service." Also, much of what IS readily available is rarely of much interest. "There's pedophilia and bestiality, but they're often about as titillating as an article in an academic journal." ("Porn and AntiPorn")
Probably the most telling example of this journalistic bias to come along recently was the Time magazine cover story, "On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn", which focused on a study by a student at Carnegie-Mellon University.
This study, by then-undergraduate Martin Rimm, claimed to have analyzed the availability and types of pornography available on the "Information Superhighway". In actuality, the primary focus was on restricted-access adult-only Bulletin Board Systems, with only minor attention paid to the publicly accessible Usenet and World Wide Web of the Internet. It also stated that 83.5 percent of all images transmitted over Usenet were pornographic.
This study has provoked abundant criticism. To begin with, the study was held under a secrecy agreement between Rimm, Time, and the Georgetown Law Journal (which published Rimm's study). No one except Rimm, a few contributors to the Journal, and Philip Elmer-DeWitt, author of the Time article, were allowed to see it. (Brainard) Since the study itself was being published in a law journal - an action questionable by itself - where no peer-review takes place, and no outside experts were allowed to read it, questions were immediately raised as to its accuracy. Mike Godwin, legal council for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "was stunned - if there were questions about the study's reliability (and [he] still had every reason to believe there were), the arrangement Philip [Elmer-DeWitt] told [him] about practically guaranteed that those questions wouldn't be fully considered by Time's editors." (Godwin) The secrecy that originated with Rimm "assured that its absurd conclusions would get maximum media play" before critics could develop arguments. (Brainard) Professors Hoffman and Novak, of Vanderbilt University, say that "given the vast array of conceptual, logical, and methodological flaws in the Rimm study, at least some of which Time was aware of prior to publication, we believe Time magazine behaved irresponsibly when it accepted at face value statements made by Rimm in his manuscript." (Hoffman)
Once the study was available, after its publication, critiques began to pop up almost immediately. Mike Godwin was one of the most vocal critics, along with Hoffman and Novak. They often discuss the flawed methodology, unprovable assumptions, and unsupported conclusions that the study presents. Rimm, they say, advanced from knowledge of the existence of erotic materials on-line, to "less-sophisticated generalizations about how dirty pictures made it from the well-guarded and expensive world of adult BBSes to the more open forums of Usenet". (Brainard) The study infers a prevalence of pornography on publicly accessible Internet systems based on an analysis of private, pay BBSes that are not networked. "Even from the abstract, it was apparent that the bulk of Rimm's data came from 68 'adult' BBSes - to generalize from commercial porn BBSes to 'the Information Superhighway' would be like generalizing from Time Square adult bookstores to 'the print medium.' (Godwin) Rimm's study also claims to indicate that the general preference in pornography tends toward what he terms 'paraphilia' - bestiality, bondage, sadomasochism, etc. - and states that this tendency is representative of all on-line pornography consumption. (DeWitt, "Cyberporn") However, "this isn't the typical range of content you find in Usenet newsgroups, or on commercial services, or even on most BBSes. Instead, this is the range of content you find on the specialized subclass of commercial BBSes that focus on pornography." (Godwin) By generalizing from non-networked systems that restrict access to adults and provide a specific type of material - which the study specifically sought out - to publicly accessible groups on the Internet, the study destroyed its credibility as a scholarly work.
I discuss this study in such length because it was the focus for a recent, highly controversial article in Time magazine. When Marty Rimm approached Philip Elmer-DeWitt, a senior editor of Time magazine, with the offer of exclusive to the then unpublished study -- in order to cover it before anyone else had access to its published form in GLJ -- Elmer-DeWitt jumped at the chance. (Brainard) DeWitt persuaded Time management to put the story on the cover, bumping two other candidates. Hoffman/Novak's comment is that "the Time cover story has given the Rimm study a credibility it does not deserve." (Hoffman)
Not only does the story, in a major newsweekly, base itself solely on a flawed study, it furthers the inaccuracies by misrepresenting the results of the study. "Trading in sexually explicit imagery, according to the report, is now one of the largest (if not the largest) recreational applications of users of computer networks," reads the Time article quoting Rimm. (DeWitt, "CyberPorn") But as Hoffman/Novak point out, "there is zero evidence for this statement - Rimm's study doesn't even examining 'trading behavior' on Usenet news groups." (Hoffman) The article suggests that the study is a "gold mine for psychologists, social scientists, computer marketers, and anybody with an interest in human sexual behavior," (DeWitt, "CyberPorn") yet Hoffman and Novak refer to it as "an unsophisticated, poorly executed, weakly documented study conducted by an undergraduate in electrical engineering that was not published in a rigorously peer-reviewed scholarly behavior science journal." (Hoffman)
One might suggest that Time and Philip Elmer-DeWitt were unaware of the expert opinions surrounding this study, if not for Mike Godwin.
Given what I already knew about Rimm's research, I was appalled that Time would publicize it - I immediately tried to warn Philip of the methodological and other problems I had with the study. He told me the study was going to be published in an article in the Georgetown Law Journal, that Time had an exclusive, and that he (that is, Philip Elmer-DeWitt) found Rimm's methodology convincing. (Godwin)
DeWitt also seems to have intentionally obscured important facts about the study. In the story, "the profound problems with the study's methodology go undiscussed. ... [there is] not a hint of how methodologically flawed the study is, or about how the legal footnotes were spiced with citations from anti-porn zealots like Catharine MacKinnon and Bruce Taylor." Godwin questioned DeWitt about "writing and editorial decisions he'd made ... decisions that both maximized the extent that the story exacerbated the Great Internet Sex Panic and actually obscured critical facts about the study," and received no answers of any substance. (Godwin)
The Time article has also been accused of being sensationalistic and of deceiving its readers. "The *packaging* of the story -- a cover with an innocent child at a keyboard, the painting of men fucking a computer or being pulled into one -- is deeply sensationalistic," writes Godwin, "Philip had written the story in such a way that, in effect, he would be deceiving great numbers of his readers." (Godwin)
Whether or not the Rimm study is accurate, and whether or not Time accurately reported it, the fact of its effect is unquestionable; It increased the level of public concern about the supposed dangers of the Internet. When asked by DeWitt, prior to the release of the Time article, about what effect he thought publication of the study and the article about it would have, Mike Godwin replied, "It will be a disaster. It won't matter if you try to balance your presentation of the study with the questions people have about its methods and reliability. It'll be used to stoke the fires of the Great Internet Sex Panic." And the very day of the article's release, 26 June, 1995, Godwin posted the following comment to the WELL:
Philip's story is an utter disaster, and it will damage the debate about this issue because we will have to spend lots of time correcting misunderstandings that are directly attributable to the story.For example, when Philip tells us what the Carnegie Mellon researchers discovered, he begins his list with this:
'THERE'S AN AWFUL LOT OF PORN ONLINE. In an 18-month study, the team surveyed 917,410 sexually explicit pictures, descriptions, short stories and film clips. On those Usenet newsgroups where digitized images are stored, 83.5 percent of the pictures were pornographic.'
Who but the most informed among us will not come away with the impression that the CMU study involved a survey of 917,410 items *on Usenet*? (Guess what -- it didn't.)
Senator Grassley of Iowa used the Time article -- and further distorted facts by misquoting a piece of already misquoted data -- in speech he gave on the floor of the senate, in front of the C-Span cameras, advocating an anti-pornography bill that he is sponsoring. He talks of a "Carnegie-Mellon University Study" that surveyed "900,000" images.
As HotWired's Muckraker put it:
Then Grassley plays the Rimm Factor: "Mr. President, I want to repeat that: 83.5 percent of the 900,000 images reviewed - these are all on the Internet - are pornographic, according to the Carnegie-Mellon study." (Meeks)
Shortly after the release of the Time cover story, Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote a second story, much shorter this time, in which he admitted to possible problems with the study and Time's coverage of it. "Some clearly believe that Time, by publicizing the Rimm study, was contributing to a mood of popular hysteria, sparked by the Christian Coalition and other radical-right groups, that might lead to a crackdown," he wrote. Yet, at the end he attempted to draw attention away from the issue of the validity of the study and the propriety of the Time article, by stating that "[i]t would be a shame ... if the damaging flaws in Rimm's study obscured the larger and more important debate about hard-core porn on the Internet." (DeWitt, untitled)
This discussion has centered around the media and their portrayal of the Internet. With the many positive ramifications on becoming connected to the virtual ccommunity, it is, indeed, a shame that these journalists must take a negative approach. From the examples discussed above, it is evident that a number of highly respected 'news' sources angle their reporting in a very negative direction regarding the Internet. This bias is spread to their readers, and serves only to hinder the advance of computer technology, and promote the political agendas of anti-Internet activists. Outside of the computer industry, much of the print media remains biased against the Internet. This bias turns up time and again in inaccurate stories which portray only the negative points, emphasize the danger, and downplay the usefulness of this new, and necessary medium.