NYTimes Swallows RIAA's Load (Score 5, Insightful)

[I wrote this for my weblog but it applies here]

The NYTimes has become more of a shill for the RIAA and conservatives in the government. In the article they actually printed this as credible information:

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.

They go on to present the opposing side of the issue, but it doesn't really refute the meme of massive amounts of child porn on the net:

The GAO study vastly overstates the likelihood that children searching for popular music will in fact find pornography, according to studies by Public Knowledge, an advocacy group on intellectual property issues.

By even lending any credence to a study that did not actually download the files the NYTimes is showing how easily they can be used.

A little clue here folks, these descriptions are what's commonly referred to as false advertising. 99% of that "42 percent" will not contain child porn. At most you'll get some badly dubbed European movie from the 80's where some 30 year old woman is wearing pony tails and trying to act coy. Those sorts of mile-long filenames with every sex search term you could think of are leftovers from files that have been passed around for years on services like Hotline where you either pay or upload other files in trade to download pirated porn or software.

These file names are just like the stupid search engine spamming where porn sites used to put as many porn words in their meta tags and white-on-white body text to get to the top of the results. Someone sharing on Hotline wanted to generate as much traffic as possible to their server. Then in order to download this forbidden fruit, you had to upload more warez or pr0n or pay them, thus increasing the size of the server owners collection and/or wallet.

Later in the article they (correctly) pick up on another reality of P2P porn: a lot of it is now just advertising for pay sites. Now let's see... do you think that the porn site operators name the files that they share in a way that clearly shows that you're going to download an ad? Well, no they also use the same sorts of filenames with every graphic description that you could imagine - which often doesn't have much to do with the actual contents.

If the RIAA members had half a brain, they'd stop pouring money into getting songs on the radio and MTV and just load up all the good singles and videos onto KaZaA. Then they'd all take a few clues from Apple and UMG and make it easier and cheaper to get the albums electronically or on CD. Oh, but wait, they've stopped making good albums.

Maybe this is a bad example, but I really can't comprehend the school of thought in journalism where you just report the statements of opposing sides of an issue with equal weight and little personal analysis. In this particular case it would be very dangerous for a reporter themselves to download potential child porn. If they actually found some they would be committing a serious crime.

The real problem here is that I read far to many articles by journalists who are generalists. They are taught that there is this universal approach to researching and writing stories and they can apply it to any subject - which is complete bullshit. Sure you can start learning from a general standpoint, but journalism should be about trying to present the facts as they are. That requires an understanding of the subject matter, which requires some expertise and experience.

Unless this particular article was completely watered down and edited to death, I get the impression that the reporter has never actually downloaded porn through a P2P service.