Eichenwald

One thing that caught my attention when I read the NYT article was the claim that Justin gave his "customer records" to the Times, and they checked the 1500 "pedophiles" and found they were from all walks of life.  Now, at the time Justin shut down his porn operation, he was a legal adult, and was running a web site indistinguishable from any other pay adult site, replete with the required notice that "All Models are over 18 years of age, records on file."  Does that mean that anyone who paid for access to that Web site with a credit card got lumped in with the people who paid Justin for webcam performances when he was 14?  This is the kind of shoddy agenda-laden reporting typical in these cases.  Does anyone remember when the US government busted an age verification service because two web sites that used their codes, located in foreign countries, had underage material on them?  They then characterized everyone who'd bought an age verification code as "people who had paid for access to child porn," and shopped the customer list around to a bunch of other countries for sting operations.

Any reporting on alleged child porn in the US suffers from a number of problems, most notable of which is the fact that even journalists are legally prohibited from looking at the material in question to report to readers whether its content is being lied about.  It's basically a situation in which you can write anything, no matter how outrageous, about "international pedophile rings" and "luring" and "poor little abused children" and it will get published with no fact-checking, and in an environment in which no one can be publicly suspicious about its claims, for fear of attracting negative attention to themselves.

I haven't seen a single article in the mainstream press in the last ten years on the subject of child porn that wasn't deliberately inflammatory, dripping with value-laden terminology, and full of deliberate lying by omission, juxtiposition, and innuendo.  Mr. Eichenwald's relationship with Justin Berry clearly violated almost every rule of objective journalism.  Given that the NY Times article is a single source for the entire Justin Berry story, basing an encyclopedia article solely on that article, and on derivative journalism generated by it, is an example of "truthiness," not "factiness."