Some of this is a function of news reporters looking for sexy stories, and a lot of it is the result of particular forces in American public life trying to shape an agenda about American cultural life, particularly the cultural Right, or the religious Right, which is trying to build a new consensus that new media belong in a more restrictive regime for speech than exists for the traditional press. For many of us, especially civil libertarians, there are problems with the Supreme Court's definition of obscenity. It is not fully defined. It varies according to community standards, and it is hard to know what your community standards are until you've been prosecuted. This puts people in the position of proving that speech has serious literary, artistic, or social merit in order to survive obscenity prosecutions.
Civil libertarians regard that as too restrictive.
The Right regards that as too liberal and too loose. Those on the Right do not want to see any kind of escape clause in terms of publicly acceptable speech that has to do with serious literary, artistic, or social value. They would like to say there are some things you cannot say in public, even if they have serious literary, artistic, or social value. The Right plays on our fears in order to advance that agenda. Those are potent buttons to push for people unfamiliar with the medium.