From: Edward D. Isenberg
Internet: ed-ae@imlearn.com

January 7, 1996

Mr. Dan Davids
Senior Vice President of Marketing
A&E Network
800 Century Park East
Suite 450
Los Angeles, CA 90067

This letter also sent via fax to 310-286-7116

Dear Mr. Davids:

A former award-winning investigative reporter for newspapers, radio and television (now disabled), I was disappointed and embarrassed by the report "Wired for Sex" on A&E Investigative Reports (January 6, 1996). It was filled with inaccuracies, sensationalism, superficiality and incomplete reporting that was so blatant that it bordered on the type of yellow journalism found on tabloid TV.

The Internet?

To start with, the program was advertised as being an expose about pornography on the "Information Superhighway" and specifically, the Internet. Undoubtedly this was because the Internet is a "hot" word that provokes interest and thus higher ratings. Throughout the program the word "Internet" was used repeatedly, 10 times in all, and the names of those profiled were displayed in a pseudo-Internet format. Unfortunately the words "Internet," "Information Superhighway", "cybersex," "interactive," "on-line," "the Net," "CD-ROM," "computer," and "computer bulletin board" were used almost interchangeably despite the fact that they mean very different things. In actuality, very little of the program really dealt with the Internet, which is what is commonly considered to be the Information Superhighway (at least, as the latter exists today). Of 19 segments, only 4 clearly dealt with the Internet, despite at least two explicit promises within teases.

• The first interview didn't have anything to do with computers, "cybersex," or even pornography, but rather dealt with people who make dates using a telephone dating service and voice mail.

• The segments on "English Palace," "Amateur Action," and "Linda and Fred" were about Bulletin Board Services ("BBSs"), which are not new, not part of the Internet, not accessed by millions of people, and not considered the Information Superhighway.

• The Silberman and McMahon segments dealt with America Online, which might be considered part of the Information Superhighway but is not accessible by anyone on the Internet and is instead restricted to its own subscribers. The Silberman and Offit interviews were intercut despite the fact that the former was talking about America Online and the latter was talking about the Internet. The McMahon segment dealt with America Online but was misidentified as a "family-oriented bulletin board" when it is a commercial on-line service, quite a different thing.

• One commercial break was preceded by the tease "When Investigative Reports returns... we take a walk through the red-light district of the Information Superhighway." The next segment concerned itself with pornographic CD-ROMs, which have nothing to do with what anyone defines as either the Internet or the Information Superhighway.

• One third of the Linda Miller interview discussed and showed pornographic films, which have nothing to do with the subject and were not used to put computer-based pornography into perspective. The rest dealt with CD-ROM-based pornography, which has nothing to do with the Information Superhighway or anything on-line.

• Before another commercial break Mr. Kurtis delivered the tease "When Investigative Reports returns: going live on the Internet for your very own personal sexual fantasy." Instead, the first segment after the break started with Celeste and Colt and dealt with pornographic videos that Kurtis said "will show up as a soft-core feature on cable, a hard-core version on cassette, as still images in mens' magazines, and probably, if the audience likes all that, as a CD-ROM as well." No Internet. The next segment, on Virtual Fantasies, dealt with live video "on demand" but it appears the Internet wasn't involved here either (if it was the audience must be microscopic, since the software is expensive and hardware requirements are not commonly available). Then the next segment, on Zyber Fantasy's virtual reality system, was, according to Mr. Kurtis, "meant for bars and night-clubs. A home unit is a little further off." Still no Internet. In fact, there was nothing about the Internet anywhere in the program after that tease.

The Rimm Study

In the opening to his report, Bill Kurtis said "A new university study reveals there are now nearly 500,000 pornographic images, animation and files available in Cyberspace, and the number of people downloading them into their computer is in the millions." From the examples and statistics he used it is clear he was referring to the one done by Martin Rimm at Carnegie Mellon University and reported in his Georgetown Law Journal article. It is no wonder Mr. Kurtis didn't mention the study by name; since that study has been thoroughly discredited. A systematic critique of it was performed by Donna L. Hoffman & Thomas P. Novak, Associate Professors of Management and Co-Directors of Project 2000, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University (a copy is attached in the mailed version).

• The implication in Mr. Kurtis' reference was clear that this was a "university study." However, Rimm was only an undergraduate electrical engineering student at CMU at the time the study was performed. Further, he was the sole author; no others have taken any credit for the intellectual content of his study (others listed were in the form of an acknowledgment by him and not an endorsement by them). Carnegie Mellon has since publicly distanced itself from the Rimm study. To just say "a university study" gives it credibility it clearly does not deserve.

• In contrast to Rimm's unsupported and inaccurate assertion that 83.5% of Internet USENET pictures are pornographic, his own study showed that pornographic pictures make up only about one-half of one percent of the total traffic on the Internet. The statistic about "almost 500,000 pornographic" items that Mr. Kurtis quoted apparently refers to the number of images downloaded by Rimm from 68 adult BBSs, while his study was purportedly about pornography on the Information Superhighway (i.e., the Internet). The figure of millions of people downloading pornography is not supported by Rimm's study.

• Time Magazine, which based a cover story on this study last summer, subsequently printed a retraction, and the author of the Time story publicly admitted that the study should have first been reviewed by experts in the field.

One-sided Reporting

The program portrayed the negative aspects of on-line "dating" and sex-talk, without discussing any of the positive aspects.

• It found a couple that had met on-line and now were married three years, but concentrated on the dangers rather than the fact that they would never have met without using the computer as an intermediary.

• The report failed to mention the relief on-line and CD-ROM sex provides for those who are house-bound such as the disabled.

• It didn't discuss the importance of using sexually-oriented discussion groups on the Internet and commercial on-line services to those who feel compelled to discuss their feelings but need anonymity in order to be comfortable doing so. I personally was in charge of a discussion group for people with my physical disability, and one prolonged conversation over many weeks was on the subject of sex when one partner is chronically ill.

Were the above discussions pornographic, even if some were sexually explicit? Should they be banned in order to "keep our information superhighway clean?"

Cheap Sensationalism

Sometimes the program descended into cheap sensationalism.

• It made a big point about linking the Consumer Electronics Show to the tawdriness of its host city, Las Vegas. It used innuendo to insult companies shown in the segment (Microsoft, Compaq, and Vivitar) and a trade show which is attended by 100,000 people but in which pornographic products play a very small part. Would Investigative Reports take such a cheap shot at all the other trade shows that are held in Las Vegas? Or suggest that a trade show for X-rated BBS operators would somehow be more wholesome and upstanding if held in, say, Omaha?

• Another misleading point was in the Sgt. McMahon segment, when he said "...and 99% of the cops cannot trace [people on-line]." This is sensational-sounding, but irrelevant. 99% of the cops probably don't know how to do fingerprint or blood-type analysis, but that doesn't mean that people can't be easily traced by both methods.

• In connection with the Seymore Butts / Larry Miller segment, Mr. Kurtis used the phrase "produced by a group of barely post-adolescent computer jockeys...." This brings up images of teenage children, but it is unclear exactly what age these people really are: 17? 19? 21? even older? The people interviewed and seen as the camera panned looked to me to be in their mid-twenties, hardly "barely post-adolescent."

• The Larry Miller segment also had Mr. Kurtis saying "Larry Miller's enterprise grew 10-fold in the first year. He founded another, which has blossomed as well. He employs 60 people. His equipment is worth a million and a half dollars. Some of his products are not sexually explicit, but some are." This is horribly sloppy reporting. The numbers suggest a large porn business, but we are not told what percentage of those people and that equipment is devoted to sexually explicit material and what isn't. The result is the viewer is left just remembering the large numbers, not the caveat.

Outright Inaccuracies

There were outright inaccuracies that just pointed out how little the program researchers understood about the technology they were reporting on.

• In the Amateur Action segment, Mr. Kurtis showed several banks of modems and said that "every flashing modem light is a person retrieving files." This overstates the correct number many many times. At most it would be one person per modem, and that assumes that every modem is connected and every connection is someone downloading a file, both highly unlikely.

• He also stated "in Cyberspace, unless you choose otherwise, nobody need know your name." This is grossly misleading. In fact, the vast majority do use their real names or User IDs, and it takes very considerable technical knowledge, energy and/or money to send EMAIL truly anonymously. The anonymous server in Finland is famous, but the percentage of Internet users who use it or any other anonymous identity is insignificant. Mr. Kurtis himself called the Finnish service "the biggest... message laundering service in the world" but he said they only process 8,000 messages a day, which is an invisibly small number when compared to 30 million Internet users worldwide. Further, the commercial on-line services, used by roughly 8 million people, are virtually impossible to use anonymously once a complaint is logged and the service wants to trace someone.

Superficiality and Incompleteness

The report is so incomplete as to give a completely false impression of both the existing situation and possible remedies to perceived problems. For example, the following were all left out so as to make room for more sensational (if less informative) material:

• the fact that non-trivial technical knowledge required to access, retrieve, decode and view pictures from the Internet (especially USENET newsgroups);

• a comparison between the prevalence of sexually-oriented material via computer modems vs other sources (such as readily-available adult magazines, cable-TV and theatrical movie soft-core pornography, adult videotapes, etc.);

• the respective risks a child is in from on-line molesters and pornography vs. other similar and dissimilar dangers (in my personal but informed opinion, with even a few parental precautions the child can be virtually 100% safe on-line);

• a true picture of the prevalence of sexually-oriented material on the Internet as a percentage of the total traffic (i.e., items transferred) over that medium (again, less than 0.5%, according to Rimm himself);

• how to balance the desires of states and countries who have widely differing viewpoints of what should and should not be tolerated (from Finland's permissiveness to Germany's restrictiveness), and the impossibility of America dictating what will be on the Internet, a communications system that is accessible in over 100 countries;

• a review of the proposed Communications Act, highlighting the endless debate between those who wish to impose local community standards and those who support unrestrained freedom of speech, pointing out that:

• the well-established U.S. Supreme Court doctrine of not forcing Small-town, Nebraska to live by the standards of Times Square, New York also works in reverse: those living in Milpitas, California shouldn't have to live by the standards of a local prosecutor in Tennessee, either, and

• the well-established U.S. Supreme Court doctrines that there is a difference between pornography and obscenity, and that the former is protected as free speech and cannot be restricted from adults simply in order to keep it away from children;

• most importantly, the easy ways to protect children from inappropriate material and ways parents can monitor what their children are getting off their computer, without having to unnecessarily infringe on the rights of all Americans to say, read and see what they want.

In Conclusion

In short, Investigative Reports could have shed light on the subject. Instead it only added heat.

I would appreciate you forwarding this complaint to Mr. Bill Kurtis, Executive Producer of Investigative Reports, and Mr. Gayle Gilman, Manager of Documentary Programming for A&E. I would also appreciate a detailed response.

Sincerely,

s/Edward D. Isenberg

Attachment in mailed version: "A Detailed Analysis of the Conceptual, Logical, and Methodological Flaws in the Article: 'Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway' "