The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [41]
The story’s main point—that cyberspace so overflows with smut, some is sure to leak out of your child’s computer screen—was anchored to seemingly solid scientific evidence. “A research team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has conducted an exhaustive study of online porn,” Time reported. They found “917,410 sexually explicit pictures, descriptions, short stories and film clips.” The Time article identified Marty Rimm as “the study’s principal investigator,” a rather reverential way of referring to him, considering that Rimm conducted the research as an undergraduate student and some of the people he listed as members of his research “team” renounced the study. Rimm’s resume didn’t exactly qualify him as a research scientist, either. He had spent much of his time in the years since his previous research project working in Atlantic City casinos (where he was the subject of investigations by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement) and writing and self-publishing a lewd novel and a nonfiction work entitled The Pornographer’s Handbook: How to Exploit Women, Dupe Men & Make Lots of Money.18
Rimm’s exclusivity agreement with Time ensured that true experts on computer networks could neither see nor comment on his study until the magazine hit the stands. As soon as these folks did get their hands on his paper, however, they pulverized it. Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, professors at Vanderbilt University, pointed out that by his own admission in his paper, of the 917,410 files Rimm says he found, only 3 percent actually contained potentially pornographic images. The images were not readily available to children in any event, because they were on bulletin boards that required membership fees. Of 11,576 World Wide Web sites Rimm examined—cyberplaces children might actually visit—only nine (.08 percent) contained material that Rimm considered R- or X-rated.19
Another of Rimm’s statistics included in the Time article had an impact beyond the pages of the magazine. “On those Usenet newsgroups where digitized images are stored, 83.5% of the pictures were pornographic,” Time reported. Within days that figure got repeated throughout the media and by members of Congress who were pushing a piece of legislation to censor the content of the Internet. Conservative groups such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and Gary Bauer’s Family Research also had a field day. The 83.5 percent figure became a main-stay in their solicitation mailings and speeches.20
When critics got a look at Rimm’s paper, however, they discovered that the 83.5 percent referred to the proportion of porn postings at just seventeen Usenet news groups. At the time of Rimm’s study there were thousands of Usenet groups in existence. Only a tiny percentage of these contained any dirty pictures, and you needed special software to view them.21
What Rimm’s study suggested, if anything, was that adult, middle-class, computer-literate men no longer had to frequent seedy store-fronts to view smut. But a cover story on that topic wouldn’t boost circulation, so Time opted instead for the kids-at-risk hook. “The great fear of parents and teachers” is that “this stuff” will fall into the hands of children “who are not emotionally prepared to make sense of what they see,” the article asserted. To back up the claim, they quoted a mother in Skokie, Illinois, who refused her sons’ request for Internet access. “They could get bombarded with X-rated porn,” the mom exclaimed,