From what I saw of a piece by Amber Lyon, CNN is fully allied with the rest of the mainstream media and political establishment in the war against craigslist.
I left a comment, but it is currently “awaiting moderation”, so I decided to post it here for your viewing pleasure:
Ok, so you say in the video that you have “run into a lot of victims”. How many, exactly, is “a lot”? How many of the victims you have run into are children? Of all these thousands of ads, surely you must have come up with at least a few hundred so-called victims that you immediately marched down to the local district attorney’s office to open criminal cases against the slave masters and pimps who forced them into that line of work, right?
I find it odd that “the press” is fast becoming one of the most vocal advocates for internet censorship, which is precisely what CNN is suggesting in this piece. Since the First Amendment restricts the government from prohibiting these ads, you’re promoting an end run around the Bill of Rights by climbing aboard the intimidation bandwagon to get craigslist to do what you have no legal right to do yourselves.
You uncritically buy into propaganda from political advocacy groups like the Fair Fund and repeat their sound bites because, after all, how can you argue with an outfit with “fair” in their name. Especially one that “rescues” children.
To counter the argument that prostitution is a victimless crime, anti-prostitution crusaders claim that all prostitutes are victims. Prostitutes that say they are in the business of their own free will are in denial and too retarded to know they are being exploited. And to further inflame public sentiment, these activist groups claim that “a lot” of prostitutes are children. They then back up these claims with estimates (guesses based on the tip-of-the-iceberg theory) and delusional claims that news outfits like CNN mindlessly repeat without question.
While there are certainly abuses, as there are in any business, prostitution is, at its core, nothing more than a exchange of sex for money by consenting adults. Your intentional distortion of the picture in order to generate public outrage and boost ratings puts you squarely along side Fox News as sacrificing objectivity on the alter of sensationalism and profits.
It would be interesting if, just once, CNN would take the initiative to do actual investigation rather than jumping on the latest news trend and reporting exactly the same mindless drivel that every other lazy news outlet is reporting (and I use the term “reporting” very loosely).
The best thing craigslist could do is nothing. They are not internet policemen and they are not doing the American public any good by caving in to intimidation and threats from those who demand that they impose politically motivated censorship rules on what its users want to say. My hope is that craigslist will fight this witch hunt to the very end. Trying to please moral crusaders and petty tyrants just whets their appetite for more.
[Update] Surprise. They didn’t post my comment. Other commenters made some of the same points I made, however (including the comparison of CNN with Fox News).
That’s probably because you used the r-word in your comment. Those retards.
That actually occurred to me. In a differently worded first cut, I used “idiot”, but then decided retard/retarded had a more powerful effect, thanks to its now politically incorrect status. I suspect they rejected it because it was too long, but that’s just a guess.
My comment certainly hit the mark in pointing out that CNN is perfectly in tune with the rest of the mainstream press. Hell, all these stories about craigslist could have been written by the same person they are so similar. There just isn’t an original thought to be found in the news coverage of this issue.