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« | Main | Saturday, in the Park, ~~you'd think it was the fourth of July~~ »

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{ Saturday, September 6, 2003 }

This really annoyed me: The New York Times has the headline "Man Charged With Raping Girl He Met on Internet" under the "Technology" section. You never see "Man Charged With Raping Girl He Met on Telephone" under the "Technology" section or "Man Charged with Raping Girl He Met at School" under the "Education" section. Stewart tells me he saw the headline "Man Dies of Overdose of Web Drugs", as if people don't die every day from drugs they bought at the pharmacy. Why are journalists demonizing the internet like this? It's infuriating.

LINK | 11:55 AM | TB

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{ COMMENTS }

Inasmuch as there is a 'them' they are afraid of what this is. The net, or what the net is becoming, or might become.
Art Linkletter's daughter walked out a window on LSD, or someone said she did. Charlie Manson was a hippie, or he looked like one.
Evil drugs, evil long-hairs, evil chat rooms.
It's always about control. The viciousness of that control is invisible unless you're directly in its line of fire.
Saying that it's journalists, that these decisions of portrayal are made by the writers themselves, is naive. But then it isn't necessarily a dark cabal in the boardrooms either. There's a third term in the equation somewhere. Something less distinct but just as real.

msg | September 6, 2003 3:29 PM

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Synchronous propinquity:
"People who cling to paradigms (just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything we think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is no power, no control, not even a reason for being, much less acting, in the experience that there is no certainty in any worldview. But everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it a basis for radical empowerment."
—Donella Meadows
quoted at Parking Lot September 06

msg | September 6, 2003 4:02 PM

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Answering my own question: having worked in a room that was, if not a newsroom, at least a place where news was being made, I have seen lazy journalists groping around for a "spin", and seizing on cultural anxieties was often a great way to meet deadline and capture eyeballs at the same time. It's a staple of tabloid journalism, and while it's pretty clear that all media is beholden to money or corporations or ideology or cultural bias, The New York Times at least strives -- or purports to strive -- for higher standards than that.

Caterina | September 6, 2003 4:06 PM

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Journalists are no brighter or better than anyone else. Rape is not news. Someone's being raped right now. And there are no new lies or schemes for arranging rapes. Man befriends girl, gets girl alone, inserts penis. The writer needed a story and went for Internet combined with underaged sex. Almost as sure a sell as "Actual penis enlargement" in the health section.

It takes time for readers (and therefore writers) to stop seeing the pointless details as somehow important. We don't see "Man uses tame horse to escape" or "Man uses feather and dye to write ransom demands," but maybe these details would have been distracting a long time ago.

Just as nothing is "electronic" anymore because everything is electronic, all phones will be "phones" (no "cell" or "mobile") again, all mail will be "mail" (no "e") again, people will stop fretting about "wireless" this and that, and girls will be raped by men using whatever new gadgetry it is that I'm not imagining right now. And if it's "Invisible man rapes girl," maybe it will be news, but not for long.

eeksypeeksy | September 6, 2003 5:19 PM

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The issue was why the Internet was linked so causatively to the story. It's not a pointless detail if it's facilitating sexual predation of the innocent young. That's extremely pertinent. The van at the schoolyard fence.
Though my guess is there's a preponderance of narky decoys to actual nasty men, which begs the question of ambience pollution.
My guess is the sexual abuse of children by priests and ministers far outweighs chatroom-facilitated abuse. Don't even mention foster care.
Journalists are at least a little better with the language than most other people, and brighter than the norm. Linking the net with bad things makes it easier to enact control measures, enlists public emotions, a powerful force in America, in the cause of control. The young are fast abandoning TV and its pablum for the encyclopedic Internet. Cause for concern in some corners. The old paradigm feels left behind, preterite.
I think Caterina was right to feel uneasy with the story. I think there is a kind of dim attempt at maligning in order to control, though I'm not sure who or what's behind it.

msg | September 6, 2003 9:42 PM

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"It's not a pointless detail if it's facilitating sexual predation of the innocent young."

But it _is_ pointless in the same way that running a "Man rapes girl in house" article in the real estate section (as if it was the house that made it happen) is pointless. The guy used the Internet, just as he would have used phones or letters or a paddlewheeler or horses in another day. But that doesn't make this an Internet story. A rapist waiting in a van at the schoolyard fence is a story about rape and belongs in the crime section; it is not a story about vans and should not be run in the automotive section.

eeksypeeksy | September 7, 2003 12:22 AM

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http://www.citizenlab.org/

msg | September 7, 2003 8:13 AM

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My favorite comment on this anywhere is on Plurp -- scroll down to the 'Man Charged With Raping Girl He Met in Wal-Mart'. But it is much more effective if you stumble on it out of context.

Stewart | September 7, 2003 5:07 PM

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Because Journalist won't or can't tell the truth. The internet can.

Hal | September 10, 2003 11:17 AM

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It's infuriating. It's also very 1995.

I'm all for a critical stance with regard to technology, but journalists (or, to be fair, their editors) who persist in this particular silliness at this late date are walking around with "I'm a Dinosaur -- Kick Me" tattooed on their foreheads and will get their comeuppance soon enough.

Prentiss Riddle | September 16, 2003 7:18 PM

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