Pittsburgh Catholic Newspaper - News and Features

News & Features

Children’s access to paper’s adult content questioned
archived from: 2004-07-09
by: Chuck Moody

The Pittsburgh City Paper bills itself on its tabloid front page as “the arts, entertainment & news weekly.”

The City Paper maybe also should mention what is contained within its back pages, especially since the paper is available for free to anyone, including children, from numerous boxes and racks throughout the Pittsburgh area. For example, the June 16 issue of the City Paper contained advertisements among others for: dating services, including opposite-sex, same-sex and bisexual; massage parlors; “relaxation therapy”; personal ads; and sexually oriented chat lines.

The paper also features the sexual advice column “Savage Love” in which questions are asked and answered in graphic terms.

Perhaps one of the greatest elements that allow pornography and indecency to permeate our society to such a great extent is increased and frequently unsolicited accessibility, said Susan Rauscher, diocesan secretary for pastoral and social concerns and diocesan liaison to the Commission to Counter Pornography.

“Our children can be exposed to indecent and inappropriate materials multiple times a day without any effort on their part,” Rauscher said. “Our music, television, movies and advertising can assault children and teens with graphic, erotic and explicitly sexual images and descriptions.

“The Internet has brought pornography into our homes without invitation in the form of spam e-mails. Pornographic Internet sites are not only easily accessible to children and teens, but frequently promoters intentionally title their sites with names that are commonly misspelled versions of popular young people sites.”

It seems unconscionable that a paper whose content significantly deals with graphic content and sexually explicit material can be distributed in such an open way that it can be picked up by any person of any age, Rauscher said.

“We need to reclaim an important sense of innocence and sensibility that fosters a special privacy about sexual feelings and actions that supports the beauty of our God-given sexuality,” she said. “We need to ensure that our children are protected from unhealthy and exploitative images of sexuality.”

Dorn Checkley, director of the Pittsburgh Coalition Against Pornography, said in 1987 news boxes with even more sexually explicit newsletters showed up in Pittsburgh.

“The city managed to get rid of those boxes for the very same issue: because they were unsupervised, and, as such, they violated the public display law and distributing indecency to minors,” Checkley said. “It definitely isn’t as bad as that incident in 1987.”

Sex advice columns have proliferated, Checkley said.

“They’re also available on college campuses, where there’s also minors, in college newspapers,” he said. “It’s a difficult issue as to whether or not it would be indecent to minors.”

Generally, the kind of ads newspapers run for adult places, phone services or dating services are shrewd enough to avoid violating the decency code, Checkley said.

“I don’t expect the City Paper is doing that,” he said. “State law has to define sexual acts, and these advertisers have gotten very good at going up to the letter of the law and failing the spirit of the law.

“The spirit of the indecency to minors is that we try to protect minors from the public display of sexually explicit material that’s generally meant for adults. In order not to be struck down for vagueness, the law does have to define these things, and so the advertisers have gotten very good at going right to the line of the definition.

“You can literally have total nudity in an advertisement, but by positioning the model with shadows and gauzy stuff, the model might be totally nude but you can’t see the parts of her body that were ‘nudity’ according to the law. They go right there.”

The law generally doesn’t help in terms of resolving the issue of newspapers such as the City Paper having a sex advice column, Checkley said.

“It’s not illegal or it’s not indecent to minors to give sexual advice as long as it doesn’t describe a sexual act,” he said. “Because the law says what’s indecent to minors is it has to describe an actual sexual act. So giving advice like, ‘It’s OK to do it with your boyfriend’ or ‘If you’d like to tie up your woman you should feel free to experiment’ is not indecent speech to a minor.

“Because they don’t actually describe sexual acts. They refer to them, but they don’t describe them. Describing a sexual act, according to the law, is going to be something like what hard-core movies and pictures do. They’re going to have to describe actual sexual acts.”

Andy Newman, editor of the Pittsburgh City Paper, said he generally feels he’s in “the newspaper business and not in the child supervision business.”

“I’m not running a day care center,” Newman said. “I have a newspaper, and I feel like other people are responsible for supervising their own children.”

The Pittsburgh City Paper is part of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, and Newman serves on the board of the organization.

“There are papers like this with similar content and similar advertising in virtually every large, or medium and even small city all over the country,” he said. “There are literally hundreds of papers that are doing this.

“I think part of living in a metropolitan area is that there are publications that are freely distributed that are targeted to adults and that have some adult content.”

Prosecutors contacted with regard to this article did not want to be quoted on the record. However, one prosecutor said the law is exceedingly unclear about how far government can go to regulate speech content because children have access to it, and they would have a hard time taking newspapers to court because of the access.

The City Paper is owned by Steel City Media, which also owns WRRK-FM and WLTJ-FM in Pittsburgh.

WRRK last Valentine’s Day, in partnership with a legal brothel in Nevada, ran a contest in which the winner received an all-expense-paid trip to the brothel, Checkley said.

“We found that really appalling,” he said. “Again, the ads didn’t cross the legal line. The ads for the contest itself weren’t indecent. (But) most parents would not want their children to hear that they could win by calling in or registering a trip to a legal brothel. But nevertheless, they weren’t illegal.”

Checkley said his organization went after the radio station’s sponsors as a result of the contest.

“We went to the Web site and listened to the station, got some of the radio sponsors, contacted them and asked if they wanted to be associated with this contest, as well as telling WRRK that we were appalled by it,” he said.

“According to two letters we got back from sponsors, we did cause them to lose two sponsors at least. Hopefully, for them, it was enough of a wash that they might not want to risk doing it again.

“This is a company that, I think, is willing to push the line.”

E-mail this story