Editorial from The Guide	Editorials Archive

Last December, the New York Times ran a long story "Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid World Online." It detailed how Justin Berry ran a gay-for-pay website starring himself for five years, from ages 13 to 18. Berry outlines how, after being offered $50 to take off his shirt shortly after going online with his first webcam, he learned to entice men to send more and more money, processed as online credit card transactions. Soon he was making, by his estimates, up to $900 an hour for masturbating for his online subscribers, and was successfully soliciting gifts of computer equipment to expand his business. Berry reports frequently treating his clients with contempt, delaying answers to queries just to torment his eager fans: "These people had no lives," he told the Times, "They would never get mad."

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In June, 2005, reporter Kurt Eichenwald began communicating with Berry online (without identifying himself as a reporter). Eichenwald convinced Berry, 18 at the time, to meet him. After being shown "the inner workings" of the online porn world (and thus making himself a felon under current child-porn laws), Eichenwald-- now known to be a Times reporter-- urged Berry to hand his computer records over to prosecutors. Berry did, and now hundreds of men face decades in prison because they responded to the teen's well-crafted enticements.

Eichenwald's subsequent story follows a predictable formula wherein the obvious facts of the case are ignored and a morality tale is told instead. Berry is repeatedly termed a "victim," though he was receiving thousands of dollars from men he was consciously and skillfully manipulating. And Berry's online clients are repeatedly branded "predators," though by Berry's own admission they "would never get mad" and were only the pixels of a screen name.

Most telling, however, is the video interview with Berry, now 19, posted on the Times website. In describing his early entrepreneurial days, Berry is full of life, recounting with obvious enjoyment how he built up his business by teasing clients, offering to show more if they paid more. He seems proud of how he was using his undeniable sexual allure and new technology to make gobs of money. But after his cover was blown by the Times reporter/prosecutor, Berry's demeanor changes; he now knows what he did was terribly wrong and that his former clients-- whom he now calls "pedophiles"-- are dangerous and sick men. Of course, Berry does not mention that he, now an adult, is facing life in prison if he does not cooperate with the Times-inspired prosecution. A reasonable person might think that that threat colors his current interpretation of the story, but the Times does not even mention it as a possible bias.

The poor journalistic standards evinced by the Times in this story are many. Words like "victim" and "predator" are used nonsensically to obscure, rather than reveal the truth; instead of reporting the facts with clear language, the Times is out to uphold the dogma that teens are, invariably, utterly helpless and that adults sexually interested in teens are, invariably, utterly monstrous.

And it is a tenet of responsible journalism that reporters not create the stories they are supposedly "reporting" on. But Eichenwald wasn't simply getting the facts-- he managed and created the story by urging Berry to stop his activities and cooperate with prosecutors. Many men will likely go to prison for viewing the same imagery that Eichenwald claims the right to study as a reporter.

In these days of secret police and state-sponsored fear-mongering, a free and independent press is vital to protecting civil liberties. The Berry story makes clear how little the New York Times has to contribute to that fight.