CYBERSPACE — The mainstream media is noting that the efforts to prosecute pornographers who operate websites has been pretty fruitless.Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have done stories recently on how the government has been spending $150,000 a year on having Morality In Media through its website (ObscenityCrimes.org) review porn sites referred by consumer complaints to see if the sites are suitable for going after on obscenity charges. Nothing has made the cut yet.
Morality In Media is a conservative, religious organization dedicated to ridding the world of porn.
The Justice Department wasn’t eager to talk to either paper about the waste of cash that this investment in Morality In Media seems to be, but Morality In Media President Bob Peters was ready to defend his organization. In a release, Peters said, “Morality in Media should be honored that a project it launched to combat Internet obscenity has been criticized in short order by two of our nation’s leading left-leaning daily newspapers. We must be doing something right; or perhaps the fear is that we may do something right in the near future, if the liberal press doesn’t come to the rescue of hardcore pornographers.”
The fact that hunting down obscenity has been outsourced by the government to a religious group wasn’t lost on Professor Stephen Bates from the University Of Nevada Las Vegas who obtained information on MIM’s work through filing a federal Freedom Of Information Act request about the program. In op-ed pieces that ran in multiple newspapers across the U.S., Bates referred to MIM’s work as “a mockery of the First Amendment, chilling freedom of expression” and that MIM places “the Bible over the Constitution.”
Peters of MIM, in response to the open media criticism of his organization and took little responsibility for not finding anything that bad out there and expressed disappointment in the lack of obscenity prosecutions by the Justice Department based off his organization’s work.
“We’d like to see some prosecutions that arose from the complaints submitted to the Web site,” Peters said to the Times. “But it’s ultimately up to the Justice Department, and I can’t tell the Justice Department what to do.”
Let’s be thankful of that.
