Abrams Report's Politically-Correct Kabuki Dance on Exploited Boy [avoiding gay angle]

Abrams Report/NewsBusters ^ | Mark Finkelstein

[governsleastgovernsbest]

by Mark Finkelstein

December 23, 2005 - 18:53

Let's get some things straight up front:

There are all sorts of predators on the internet, including of course many heterosexual males trolling for females.

That being said, Abrams Report guest host Lisa Daniels and NY Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald managed to pull off an amazing PC tango on this evening's Abrams Report [perhaps a holiday-time replay?].

They managed to get through an entire, extended, segment about the way a young teenage boy was exploited over the internet, without once mentioning that the predators in this case were gay males or at least peddlers of gay pornography. They pulled off the media equivalent of trying to describe a spiral staircase without using one's hands.

In a Times article, Eichenwald broke the story of Justin, a young teenager who had hooked up a web cam, and in looking for friends on the internet, gradually got lured into becoming an internet porn star.

In discussing the perpetrators, Daniels and Eichenwald referred to them variously as "they," "the predators," with Eichenwald even going so far as to call them "evil." But we were never told that the consumers of the porn were men. For all we knew, these were Desperate Housewives on line. But in fact, as Eichenwald did reveal in his Times article, the abuse went beyond the internet - Justin had been physically molested by a number of men.

If the tables were turned and a young girl had been similarly exploited, would MSNBC have avoided mentioning that the perpetrators were males? It's hard to think that the Kabuki dance here was not a conscious effort to avoid invoking the homosexual angle in the story.

[governsleastgovernsbest]

Thanks for passing along Ann's report. I think she and I are going to have to get together to compare notes ;-)