Liebling's Revenge: The Power of Interactivity
By Andrew L. Shapiro

When the history is written of the clash between old and new media at the end of the 20th century, journalist Philip Elmer-DeWitt should score a pivotal role. A writer and editor for Time magazine, Elmer-DeWitt has penned a number of important articles on technology and the Internet. But the story he'll likely be remembered for is one that he would probably rather forget. It was a special feature about Internet pornography based largely on research done at Carnegie Mellon University. Elmer-DeWitt's pitch to his editors was compelling enough to earn him the cover of the nation's most widely read newsweekly for July 3, 1995.

The subject was ripe for coverage. Members of Congress, prodded by the religious right and antiporn groups, were poised to legislate against what they perceived as the ability of minors to find reams of smut on the Internet. Civil liberties groups were trying to deflate Congress's concerns, saying they were overblown and that, in any event, parents, not government, should be the ones deciding how kids use the Net. What the debate lacked was some hard facts. And that, Elmer-DeWitt believed, was what the Time story would provide: coverage of a comprehensive university study detailing the availability of porn online.

The problem was that Elmer-DeWitt had been duped. The "Carnegie Mellon study" that Time brought to international attention with its exclusive cover story, calling it "exhaustive" and "significant," was actually a severely flawed research project by a dissembling undergraduate named Marty Rimm. Notwithstanding the fact there was a good deal of pornography online, Rimm's research methods, it turned out, were a sham. Most remarkably, Time repeated Rimm's claim that 83.5 percent of the images posted on Usenet newsgroups on the Internet were pornographic. Rimm, however, was actually evaluating adult-oriented computer bulletin-board systems (BBSs) that were not connected to the Internet and that generally required a credit card for access, thus keeping children out. Claiming that there was a lot of smut on those BBSs was like saying that there is a lot of nudity in a hermetically sealed Playboy magazine. Even before the Time issue hit the stands — with its sensationalistic cover of a wide-eyed, porn-engrossed child — free-speech activists and other Internet users were talking up a storm online about Rimm's research, the political implications of the story, and particularly why Elmer-DeWitt, a respected technology journalist, would give credibility to a study that seemed to have so many flaws.

On the Well, an influential San Francisco-based BBS of which Elmer-DeWitt was a member, the exchanges were getting increasingly heated. And things only got worse on Monday, June 26, when the Time issue became available and was immediately brandished on the Senate floor and cited on national radio and television as proof that the Internet was awash in filth. Elmer-DeWitt became — like Senator James Exon, the Nebraska Democrat who first led the effort to criminalize indecency online, and Rimm himself — an Internet pariah, subjected to a seemingly endless barrage of stinging criticism. "Don't you have a sense of self-respect? A sense of shame?," wrote Mike Godwin, counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who described himself as a friend of Elmer-DeWitt. "You've totally lost it, Philip. Don't even bother talking to me any more." Said Elmer-DeWitt: "This study was going to get covered whether I did it or not. Other newsweeklies were eager to run with it. It wasn't an easy story to write for a lot of reasons. I did the best I could." "But Phil, you take a hefty swing at a loaded topic using a goddamn Wiffle-ball bat," said another Well-ite. "I can't believe you bought into those stats, or that you wrote them up like you did." The response: "Let's take a breath here, OK? Yes, I wrote the piece. There was no gun to my head. It was not heavily edited. I have to take the heat." These comments are from the far-ranging discussion that occurred on the Well. Participants in the Well discussion likened the piece to journalistic malpractice and demanded to know whether Elmer-DeWitt and Time still stood behind it. And the more Elmer-DeWitt tried to defend himself, the more dogged his critics became. "There is not a minute's rest for Elmer-DeWitt," journalist Brock Meeks wrote, in a lengthy article about the exchange. "He is constantly hounded whenever he goes online."

Some of this riposte, to be sure, was overblown. But there were also many thoughtful objections from a variety of Internet experts and denizens. Within a few days, Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak, Vanderbilt University professors known for their work on Internet commerce, posted online a point-by-point rebuke of the Rimm study and of Time's handling of it. (Their critique was all the more damaging because, before Elmer-DeWitt published his piece, Hoffman had voiced concerns to him about it and he had discounted them.) Law professor David Post also quickly distributed online a detailed criticism of the Rimm study. And Godwin of the EFF exhaustively made the case against the Time story and the underlying study. In the face of this reproach, Elmer-DeWitt felt compelled to concede publicly online that he had made mistakes. He acknowledged that his article should have mentioned criticisms of the Rimm study raised by seasoned experts like Hoffman. Indeed, if he had been under less pressure and had had "more presence of mind," Elmer-DeWitt wrote, he and Time would have asked an outside expert to review the study. Ultimately, he admitted to his critics that he had "screwed up" by failing to do the basic fact-checking that is the bedrock of good reporting.

A few weeks later, Time published a follow-up piece by Elmer-DeWitt that was less candid than it might have been. It glossed over the way in which the magazine, in order to get an exclusive, had accepted Rimm's demand that the study not be shown to any outside experts or critics. And, according to Elmer-DeWitt, the concluding line that he wrote for the piece — "Time regrets its error" — was edited out. Still, the article could only be read as an admission that Time had been party to a hoax. Reassessing the prevalence of smut online, the magazine backed away from the 83.5 percent figure it had previously published and instead credited Hoffman and Novak's claim that porn represented less than one-half of 1 percent of all messages posted on the Internet. It admitted that "serious questions have been raised regarding the [Carnegie Mellon] study's methodology, the ethics by which its data were gathered and even its true authorship."

What drove Time and Elmer-DeWitt to make these concessions? After all, it is not every day that a leading news organization is forced to discredit a cover story, especially one that had received so much attention. Nor is it common for a prominent journalist to admit publicly that he "screwed up." Would the truth have triumphed even if the critics had made their case in more traditional ways — for example, by writing letters to the editor or publishing scholarly critiques of the coverage? Perhaps. But the Internet was integral to the counterattack. Time's story would not have been discredited as quickly had the critics — specialists and lay people alike — not been able to coalesce online. Indeed, considering the momentum that was built instantly online, the resources that were pooled, and the comparative difficulty of creating such a critical juggernaut offline, it is doubtful that the story would, absent the Net, have been refuted as quickly, as publicly, and as unequivocally as it was. Such a sustained effort could not have happened without some of the Net's unique code features — particularly its many-to-many interactivity, but also its openness, flexibility, and broad capacity, which led to the creation of an instant, burgeoning archive of evidence. With these features, a group of disparate individuals could share their concerns, swap vital information, find real expertise, come to conclusions, show their strength in numbers, challenge Marty Rimm's analysis, and ultimately inform the larger public and the media about the falsity of the cyberporn scare. The incident was a masterful example of digital activism and open debate in pursuit of truth. Individuals seized control of the flow of information. They did so in order to discredit a dangerously false report and thus influence public understanding of a vital social question — how to balance free-speech rights with the ability of the government to help parents protect their kids from certain adult materials.

Taking on Big Media

Whether or not Time recognized the potential flaws in Rimm's study, there was no way it could have anticipated the spontaneous yet concerted response it would generate online. "This is the Internet's version of the O. J. Simpson trial," said Godwin. The Time story was a milestone for the Net because it fueled cyberporn hysteria and encouraged Congress to pass the ill-fated Communications Decency Act (CDA). But as importantly, it was a turning point because it demonstrated how the Net would allow individuals to challenge the power of Big Media. Critics of the Rimm study may not have been able to prevent passage of the CDA; but they undoubtedly influenced journalists and editorial writers, most of whom wrote that the bill was draconian and unconstitutionally overbroad. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ultimately agreed.

It is perhaps logical that it would be a story about the Internet that would give its frequent users one of their first real opportunities to show what the medium could do. Since the Time incident, many other Internet controversies have prompted users to organize and try to reeducate the press and the public the way they did with the Rimm incident. Soon it will not be uncommon to find activists using the interactivity of the Net to transform public perception of national issues unrelated to technology. A misleading newspaper article or news segment about the defense budget or police brutality or affirmative action, for example, might prompt the same kind of sustained scrutiny and response that Time's article did.

Already, leading journalists are having their feet held to the fire. Amateur media critics are using the Net to talk back to those cultural gatekeepers who have traditionally assumed that their interaction with the public was a one-way street. Jon Katz, a veteran journalist who became one of the first prominent online columnists, notes how different it is to work in an interactive medium where readers bombard journalists with responses to what they write. "The only thing I can compare it to," he says, "is being tied to the back of a car and dragged through the street."

This ability of individuals to keep the media on guard is tremendously important because journalists are often the arbiters of the facts as we know them. Even if we accept that reporters are fallible and that writing can never be an entirely objective enterprise, we still rely heavily on journalists to sketch the contours of reality for us. We may be aware of the obvious editorial slants of a certain publication or author, but even the most vociferous media skeptics look first to the major daily newspapers and the evening news to find out "what happened." The opportunity, then, to hold the media accountable with objections and clarifications — or praise, for that matter — is one of the great values of an interactive medium like the Net. As Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post puts it, "the on-line feedback loop helps put news organizations and consumers on a more equal footing."

Of course, journalists are not the only members of society who use the press to shape our worldviews. Politicians, business leaders, entertainers, athletes, and religious figures all succeed in influencing our lives through their access to the media. Through a news conference, television talk show, press release, public event, film, radio interview, book, or op-ed, these individuals can air their views much more easily than the average citizen can (pace Jerry Springer and the other confession shows).

This point may — indeed, it should — be obvious, and yet it is worth mentioning precisely because it may not be as true tomorrow. That's because the Net not only allows us to dissect and criticize what is published, it lets us become publishers ourselves. We can do spin on the news or we can create the news. Even more than holding journalists accountable, this is the real way that Net users will shake the foundations of the fourth estate and the culture business writ large. With the ease and appeal of interactive media, we will increasingly become producers of information rather than just consumers of it.

Digital Auteurs

The writer A. J. Liebling famously quipped that "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." In recent years, as global conglomerates have consolidated their ownership of media outlets, Liebling's wry observation has seemed more apt then ever. In 1983, a few dozen corporations owned at least 80 percent of the market for television and radio programming, film, books, and magazines. In 1996, less than 10 firms controlled around the same share of the market, and most of these firms were engaged in ventures together. But, even before the advent of the Internet, another trend was occurring as well. Though ownership of media outlets became more concentrated, the number of those outlets proliferated — because of new technologies like cable and satellite television and because of increasing specialization in industries such as magazine and book publishing.

This simultaneous movement toward fewer owners and more choices has fueled a heated debate about how well we are being served by the media. Are we getting the news we need to be informed, responsible citizens? Are we getting diverse, high-quality information? Optimists generally believe we are — or, at least, they believe things are improving. They see a cornucopia of information options where once the pickings were slim. A handful of television networks and major publishers are losing their dominance, they note, because of emerging technologies and changes in the marketplace. Not only do we have more channels to watch and more titles to read, but technical innovations have given us more choice as consumers. The birth of the videocassette recorder meant an unlimited storehouse of viewing options and the ability to control when we watch programs. Video cameras allowed us to be documentarians, artists, or even, as the Rodney King case made clear, public witnesses to injustice. To the optimists, even before the arrival of the Net, consumers in the media marketplace never had it so good.

"The Internet puts the masses back in mass media." — Howard Rheingold

Skeptics, on the other hand, see the increasing concentration of media power as a threat to democracy, free expression, and civilized life. They maintain that the flow of unrestricted, quality content is inhibited because, no matter how many outlets there are, they are increasingly owned by a handful of megaconglomerates who care only about the bottom line. Fear of alienating advertisers, executives, and shareholders, and a desire to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator audience, they say, means less diversity and risk in programming. (It's the Springsteen gripe about 57 channels and nothing on.)

Until now, there were good reasons to believe the skeptics. But now along comes the Net and the potential for everyone to be a publisher. And suddenly it does appear that the balance of power could shift toward a more democratic equilibrium, that the "vast wasteland" of mass media might finally bloom with diversity and character. The control revolution promises, at least in theory, to give each individual or group the ability to disseminate speech far and wide without having to get permission from a Rupert Murdoch. Liebling's old saw might still be true, but now owning a "press" is a possibility within almost everyone's reach. As author Howard Rheingold puts it, "The Internet puts the masses back in mass media."

Renegade reporters like Matt Drudge, who broke the Clinton-Lewinsky story online in his Drudge Report, are already showing how this power shift might unfold. There are, to be sure, reasons to be concerned about the integrity of information in such an environment (as I discuss in The Drudge Factor). But there is also something undeniably novel and encouraging about the way that this great expansion in information sources might liberate us from the merger mania that has defined the communications industry in recent decades.

But, say the skeptics, how can the Net be an antidote to media concentration when it is still an exclusive medium, disproportionately accessible to those who are educated and wealthy? This is certainly true on a global scale. In scores of nations around the world, a basic telecommunications infrastructure hardly exists. There may be, for example, hundreds of people for each telephone line. (One African official reports that there are more phone lines in Manhattan than in all of sub-Saharan Africa.) But in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world, telephone and television penetration rates are fairly high. And the number of Americans on the Net has roughly tripled in the last three years. Inequality of access to the Net will likely continue to fade as computer prices continue to fall, as schools and libraries become wired, and particularly as the Net and digital television become integrated in the years to come. Today, Net access via TV is available for a few hundred dollars. Of course, as digital literacy and economic well-being become intertwined, inequalities relative to technology will remain. In the developed world, though, the ability to afford a Net connection will probably not be one of them. A decade from now, in fact, anyone with access to basic communications technology should be able to enjoy or contribute to the diversity of the Net, which already is a bracing alternative to the conformity of old media. Web 'zines, online newsletters, and email lists are ubiquitous. (In late 1998, there were an estimated 90,000 public email lists, 30,000 Usenet discussion groups, and 23,000 Internet Relay Chat [IRC] channels.) Academics are putting specialized journals online and other professionals are using electronic databases to find the vital facts of their trade. On the Net, one can locate almost anything that is commonly found in print — from newspapers to yellow pages to the Koran — and much more. The Digital Freedom Network, for example, specializes in publishing writings that are censored by states such as China, Cuba and Algeria. As its Web site explains, it "provides dissidents with a global audience while eluding government control." Similarly, the Bolt Reporter, an online newspaper for teenagers, has a special section in which it prints stories banned by school newspapers.

Beyond thwarting censorship, the Net gives individuals unprecedented opportunities to share all sorts of creative expression. Visual artists are building virtual galleries in which to show their work. Cartoonists are syndicating their strips online instead of in newspapers. Musicians are putting their compositions on the Internet for others to hear. As bandwidth expands and technologies improve, digital auteurs might even go head-to-head with the Disneys of the world, creating a wide-open market for cheap video distribution. You won't need a radio station and broadcast license to be a deejay or a TV station to be a newscaster. All you'll need are the tools to get your message on the Net.

From the standpoint of democracy and freedom of speech, this is the Net's richest potential feature: individuals will exercise more control over the flow of information, and over the way that society understands issues and, ultimately, itself. Put another way, if information is, as some claim, our most important commodity, what could be more egalitarian than placing the means of production in the hands of individuals? So long as we can keep powerful entities from exercising too much influence over the Net and also find reliable information, the payoff will be tangible.

- Andrew L. Shapiro is a writer, lawyer and policy analyst interested in the legal, economic and social impact of the Internet. His byline has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Observer, The Yale Law Journal and The Nation, where he is a contributing editor. In addition, he directs the Aspen Institute Internet Policy Project and is a consultant to the Markle Foundation. This essay originally appeared as a chapter in his book "The Control Revolution: How The Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know" (1999); reprinted by permission.