The Naked Untruth

Porn is back in the news again -- as if it ever left.

Last month, the Supreme Court overturned on First Amendment grounds the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act, which had outlawed “virtual” child porn. In early May, the National Research Council unveiled a long-awaited report on Internet child porn that compared the Web to swimming pools -- potentially dangerous but also fun, and requiring supervision. And two weeks later, the Supreme Court opened the door for ancient obscenity laws to be applied to online content. In response to the legal decisions, Congress is drafting a slew of bills aimed at controlling Internet porn.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media’s love affair with covering the adult industry has continued its several-year run, and not just on the local newscasts following Laker games. Ted Koppel, in the midst of protecting his job and journalistic honor from David Letterman, devoted an entire Nightline program to the sex business this March. A month earlier, the chin-strokers at PBS Frontline broadcast a one-hour special called “American Porn.” Even The Times of London overcame the usual British reticence by running a long feature in late April examining the economics of smut.

As they have been for the last two years, these stories are filled with ominous-sounding language about porn proliferation and profitability, especially in contrast to the dot-com collapse. “It’s a multi-billion dollar business -- and growing,” Frontline intoned. “In a wired world, can anything stop it?”

A better question might be, “Can anything stop the porn coverage?” Because, even as publications such as the Los Angeles Times and MSNBC assign full-time beat reporters to the adult industry, the porn-story onslaught continues to spread a series of wild myths, clouding a business that’s never before received so much sunshine.

The $10 Billion Industry That Isn’t

“Whether we like it or not, pornography has become a part of society. This industry, with an estimated yearly profit of $10 billion, has moved out of the shadows and peep shows into the mainstream fabric.”

-- Martin Renzhofer, Salt Lake Tribune, April 9

“William Lyon, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition. … Said the adult entertainment industry, which is largely based in the San Fernando Valley, had a gross profit last year estimated at between $10 billion and $12 billion.”

-- Los Angeles Daily News, April 17

Microsoft doesn’t make $10 billion a year in profits. In Los Angeles, the worldwide capital of the adult industry, the 50 most profitable publicly traded companies didn’t earn more than $7 billion combined in 2000, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal -- and that list includes such industrial giants as Occidental Petroleum, Amgen, Northrop Grumman, Unocal, City National, Hilton Hotels and Litton Industries.

The Tribune and Daily News both fell for one of the most common pitfalls of covering porn -- taking the participants’ word at face value. As I learned the hard way while writing about the adult industry off and on for the past seven years, porn people are capable of looking you straight in the eye and telling you lies so convincing that even they believe them.

Since there is precious little reliable public data about the adult business, reporters depend to an unusual degree on the veracity of people who are accustomed to secrecy and deception, and who don’t always understand the nuanced differences between such terms as “profits” and “revenue.”

It is revenue that people mean to be referring to when they call porn a $10 billion industry. And even that figure is probably way off base.

“The $4 billion that Americans spend on video pornography is larger than the annual revenue accrued by either the NFL, the NBA or Major League Baseball. But that's literally not the half of it: the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually in the United States when you toss in porn networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, Internet Web sites, in-room hotel movies, phone sex, sex toys and that archaic medium of my own occasionally misspent youth, magazines."

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