Muckraker by Brock Meeks How Time Failed Call it the "Rimm Factor." It has the sound of a plot point in a John Le Carre spy novel. And in fact, it offers intrigue and suspense, back-alley deals, and secret agreements, while the fate of a community hangs in the balance. The Rimm Factor was spawned by an undergraduate paper written by Martin Rimm, who was a 30-year-old electrical engineering major at Carnegie-Mellon University at the time the report was written. Rimm claims his paper is an "exhaustive" study of online pornography. In fact, the study is anything but exhaustive. It hangs most of its conclusions about pornography on the Internet on the descriptions of slightly more than 4,000 images. At some point, Rimm baited the Georgetown Law Journal and Time magazine into secret agreements. They could publish his findings, as long as they kept the study under lock and key. Exclusivity was the hook. And Rimm reeled Time and the law journal in like trout. How did a major magazine like Time get roped into reporting as "exhaustive" such an apparently flawed document? It was likely a combination of several factors, including fatigue, lack of time, errors in judgment, and the need to scoop the competition on a hot-button issue. The intelligence community often debriefs its agents through an exercise called "walking back the cat," during which the major players are gathered and the mission is examined in detail. All the events leading up to the cover story aren't known, but let's walk back the cat on what we do know: Early 1994 Rimm assembles his "research team" and began trolling some 68 adult BBSes. His team is instructed to obtain as much data as possible on the BBS customers, through a kind of "social engineering." Muckraker interviewed 15 major adult BBS operators to ask about their participation in Rimm's study. None of them remembers ever speaking to Rimm or a member of his research team. Muckraker asked Rimm: "Did your team go undercover, as it were, when getting permission from these [BBS operators] to use their information?" His only reply, via email: "Discrete [sic], ain't we?" When asked how he was able to obtain detailed customer profiles from usually skeptical operators of adult BBSes, he says: "If you were a pornographer, and you don't have fancy computers or PhD statisticians to assist you, wouldn't you be just a wee bit curious to see how you could adjust your inventories to better serve your clientele? Wouldn't you want to know that maybe you should decrease the number of oral sex images and increase the number of bondage images? Wouldn't you want someone to analyze your log files to better serve the tastes of each of your customers?" October 1994 Eight months before Time's "exclusive first look" at Rimm's findings were published, "people involved in the study were pitching it to the media," reports Michael C. Berch, editor of Infobahn magazine, in a posting to the alt.internet.media-coverage newsgroup. Berch said he passed on the story because he had "other coverage of Internet erotica" in the works. Rimm says he has no knowledge of an exclusive being offered to Infobahn or any other publication before it was pitched to Time. During this time, Rimm also shops a draft of his study to the CMU administration, according to a Time magazine report last year. Shocked at the findings, the school scurries to implement full-scale censorship, blocking all the alt.sex groups from flowing through the campus Usenet feed. November 1994 All hell breaks loose. Word gets out that Carnegie-Mellon University has started censoring its students' Net access. The ensuing turmoil draws media attention, and Time is there. Time reporter Philip Elmer-DeWitt hooks up with Rimm. Using sparse statistics drawn from Rimm's paper, he writes a story headlined "Censoring Cyberspace" for the 21 November 1994 issue. In the story, he refers to Rimm only as a "research associate." Elmer-DeWitt's story says the CMU administration acted on a draft of Rimm's study, which was "about to be released." Actually, the study doesn't see the light of day until some seven months later - and then only under a secrecy agreement with Time and Georgetown Law Review. Elmer-DeWitt writes in that article that Rimm (who he refers to only as a "research associate") has "put together a picture collection that rivaled Bob Guccione's (917,410 in all)." But in reality, Rimm examined few images. The 917K figure refers only to descriptions of images, not the pictures themselves. And when the data was finally washed, only some 214K of those image descriptions were valid. Then the backlash inside the CMU faculty starts. Rimm jumped the traditional chain of command by informing the university president directly that there was pornography online. Shocked, the president hands the information off to the vice provost, who follows it down the chain of command. The dean of the Carnegie Institute of Technology doesn't know about Rimm's study and is embarrassed by the provost's query. The dean hammers on the department head of computer and electrical engineering, who also hasn't heard about Rimm's findings. He too is embarrassed. Some heated words fly back-and-forth. Tempers flare and egos bruise. The issue eventually dies. December 1994 Rimm somehow secures a promise from Georgetown Law Journal to publish his study. In a 9 December message to an internal CMU newsgroup called "Prove Your Genius," he challenges people to invent some kind of filtering mechanism to block pornography. He mentions that anyone who succeeds will be cited in his study, which will be published "in May." "Naturally, I am privy to a great deal of 'inside' information, which has not yet been published," he tells the newsgroup. He also makes an appeal for people to put aside their biases and forego arguments about free speech. "The question you should be asking is not 'what is fundamentally right?' but rather 'what is most realistic and acceptable for us to accomplish?' Washington, as you know, is a playground of compromise." Two days later, Declan McCullagh, then student body president of CMU, sends a private email message to several prominent academicians and civil liberty officials questioning Rimm's "agenda." McCullagh never finds out if Rimm has a agenda. Fast-forward to March 1995 Rimm's study is entering the homestretch as Georgetown Law Journal readies it for publication. The law journal needs some extra fact checking on the study, but discovers that it's hamstrung. Rimm has locked them up in a secret agreement, too. No one, absolutely no one who isn't directly involved in the publishing of his study will be allowed to see it. Two outside legal experts, both writing companion articles to Rimm's study - which turn out to be highly supportive of its findings - have been allowed to see advance copies. David G. Post, a visiting associate professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center is approached "to help several of the student editors with questions that they had arising out of the study." But when Post, who says he has "research interests in this area," asks to be shown a copy of the study before advising the students, he too is rebuffed. "They were unable to do so because of a secrecy arrangement they had made with Mr. Rimm," he writes in the "Preliminary Discussion of Methodological Peculiarities in the Rimm Study of Pornography on the 'Information Superhighway,'" which is distributed widely on the Internet after the Time article runs. "One would have, perhaps, more confidence in the results of the Rimm study had it been subjected to more vigorous peer review," Post writes. However, law review journals - unlike rigorous scientific journals - are not routinely peer-reviewed. But this study and its purported results were anything but "routine." The potential magnitude of the study - which was not lost on Rimm (he'd already seen the white bread administration at CMU rush to trample the First Amendment after reading an early draft) - should have been enough for the Georgetown Law Journal, not to mention the editors at Time, to demand outside review, and Rimm be damned. Donna L. Hoffman, an associate professor of management at Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, readily acknowledges that law journals aren't subject to peer reviews. (Maybe this is why the majority of lawyers can't write their way past a moderately bright 14-year old.) However, she says quite bluntly and correctly: "A study like this belongs in a peer-reviewed journal if it's going to be used to impact public policies and stimulate public debate on an important societal issue." June 1995 At separate times, Rimm asks both Mike Godwin, online counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Daniel Weitzner, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, to review his legal footnotes for accuracy. Godwin and Weitzner say the task is impossible without seeing the full report. They are denied access to the study. Weitzner fires off several critical concerns he has about the footnotes anyway, noting that any kind of real analysis is impossible. Rimm later "thanks" Weitzner for his "participation," even though Weitzner clearly had denied the review request. 8-18 June A copy of the study arrives at Time magazine, where it sits idle. Elmer-DeWitt is up to his journalistic elbows trying to edit a major Time cover story on estrogen. The story is complex, and Elmer-DeWitt was riding hard on it. The good news: word filters down to him that his promotion, which has "been in the works for some time," will be official in a couple of weeks, he tells Muckraker - about the time of his vacation and right after he puts another major cover story to bed: the flash-point cyberporn story. Four Time correspondents are assigned to help research the story. Time passes quickly. Like a forest fire, Rimm's study begins to create its own atmosphere, that rarefied air of the "Exclusive." In the unrelenting, brutalizing competition among the newsweeklies, the scoop is the ace in the hole. The Time editors were convinced the Rimm study was their ace. Someone should have told them it was dealt from the bottom of the deck. So now Elmer-DeWitt begins pushing for his story, citing its exclusive nature. But Elmer-DeWitt is negotiating the story's placement based on personal bias: He was already sold on the story, having used it back in November during the CMU censorship dust-up. The story held up then, it should hold up on the cover. Besides, if it was good enough for the Georgetown Law Journal, it was good enough for Time. And Elmer-DeWitt plays the law journal card readily, admitting: "If [Georgetown] hadn't accepted [Rimm's study] for publication, we wouldn't have done our story." At this point, Elmer-DeWitt has too much invested in the story. Somehow he ignores the lingering doubts and presses forward with the writing. Later, on The Well, he will admit that he was personally "pulling for" the validity of the study. Meanwhile, one of his reporters, Hannah Bloch, is picking up some bad vibes from Prof Hoffman. Hoffman and her research partner/husband, Tom Novak, also an associate professor of management at Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, have tag-teamed some of the Net's trickiest usage-based problems, developing some of the first quantitative models for accurate Web "traffic accounting." After reading just the abstract of Rimm's study, Hoffman smells sloppy research. "This is a nice example of bad research," she told Muckraker. After the Bloch-Hoffman telephone review finally ends, Hoffman says she still feels like Bloch "didn't get it." Hoffman emails Elmer-DeWitt directly with her concerns. When Hoffman asks Elmer-DeWitt to see a copy of the study, he balks, citing the secrecy arrangement with Rimm. Hoffman lays out her concerns about Rimm's methodology and emails them to Elmer-DeWitt. Among those concerns, Hoffman notes that a study of such reported significance should have been subject to some kind of peer review. But Elmer-DeWitt blows off Hoffman's concerns, not because of flawed logic or a perception of some hidden agenda. Nope, Elmer-DeWitt decides to dismiss Hoffman when he discovers that law journals are rarely peer reviewed. This somehow lowers the credibility of Hoffman's concerns in Elmer-DeWitt's mind, and for whatever reason, he ignores them. Skepticism about the study went all the way to the top level at Time, but was never pursued. The concerns are never raised in the text of the story. A Time reader is led to believe that the study was rigorous and without fault. But in truth, the story had been criticized on several levels and by several different people. Their connection? None, save for their concern about sloppy research. So Elmer-DeWitt presses on. Can't let facts stand in the way ... he has a story to write, a vacation to get ready for. This is his baby, and he's under the gun to deliver. 19-23 June With barely a chance to breathe after the work on Time's estrogen cover story, as well as several other articles, Elmer-DeWitt wades into the reports from his other correspondents. He fields editorial questions from higher up. There are still gaping holes in the story. By end of the day Monday, the 19th, he knows he has to start writing come morning. This is crunch time. There is no more slack in the schedule. Artwork has been commissioned. The cover slot secured. His vacation is looking better all the time.... Meanwhile, Time's public relations arm is cranking into high gear. They know they have a hot cover coming up. They want to get as much mileage out of it as they can. Where do they turn? Television. They consult with Rimm. He pitches the idea of giving the story to 20/20's Barbara Walters. Rejected. Too lightweight. Larry King Live is suggested. Good talk hype, high visibility, but not a serious enough venue. Rejected. Conan and the Late Show are never considered. Finally, the Time spin doctors decide on Ted Koppel and Nightline. "We thought Koppel would do a more balanced job," Elmer-DeWitt said. Time calls ABC. "It's an exclusive, and it's yours if you want it." No one mentions the fact that Nightline was the third choice. Another secrecy deal is cut. Nightline can't give the study to anyone else either. The article hits the stands on the 26th, but by that time Elmer-DeWitt will be vacationing. The ABC producers decide to tape him Friday, the 23rd. Thursday hits and Elmer-DeWitt meets the 6 p.m. deadline. Researchers comb the story. Top editors read it, too. "Needs some work," they say, and Elmer-DeWitt cranks up the computer to satisfy his bosses. The issue is put to bed. Friday, 23 June - It's darkest before dawn At 22 hundred hours, 43 minutes PDT, Jim Thomas, a regular on The Well, uploads to The Well, under a new topic residing inside the media conference. It's an urgent message from the Voters Telecom Watch. The VTW alert puts the Net on notice: Time is ready to publish a study about porn on the Net. The VTW alert acts like an early warning flare: "The catch is that no one even knows if the study's methods are valid, because no one is being allowed to read it due to an exclusive deal between Time and the institution that funded the study." Saturday, 24 June - Bad moon rising Early in the morning, Hoffman logs on to The Well and jolts the media conference, calling the Rimm study "reckless research" and noting how difficult it is to discuss porn on the Net without throwing fuel on the fire. Elmer-DeWitt follows some five hours later with his own assessment of Hoffman's opening salvo. He says that Hoffman is right about fueling the fire, but he drops a bomb of his own: He wonders aloud how Hoffman can call the study reckless when she's never even read it. However, he conveniently forgets to tell other Well members that he denied several researchers' requests - Hoffman's among them - to see the study before they commented on the record. He also fails to mention that his secrecy agreement with Rimm made any independent review of the study impossible. This early exchange, in a topic called "Newsweeklies," set the stage for what would become a romp into Way New Journalism of the first degree. Over the course of the next eight days, this topic on The Well would give rise to a grass-roots investigative team united by no particular agenda other than seeing all the facts about the Time story vetted. Steven Levy, a writer for Newsweek, weighs in. He's also written something about porn on the Net for his publication. It runs on Monday; the Rimm study gets a single, dubious paragraph. Levy would have missed the Rimm reference altogether, but David Post, the visiting law professor at Georgetown, tips him to the fact that Time is running the story. Levy scrambles himself to obtain a copy of the study. He gets shut out. The law journal refuses him a copy, citing the secrecy arrangement with Rimm. Levy tries to find out what Rimm and the law journal are getting in return for all their secrecy. Each tells Levy to talk to the other. He gets no answer. In The Well conference, he voices his concern about such secrecy arrangements, wondering if it was a trade-off for assurances that the story would get a cover. Elmer-DeWitt barks back at Levy, defending the secrecy pact with Rimm. He says he's "much more comfortable" with that arrangement than with some that Newsweek has made with top business executives. He drops Levy a compliment, calling him "one of the best," and then backhands him: "It's not my fault he works for the magazine that secured exclusive rights to Hitler's 'diaries.' " He later retracts the remark about the Hitler Diaries, admitting it was "a low blow." He says he found it a bit ironic for Newsweek to be claiming the high moral ground. What Levy doesn't know is that in coming days, the mere mention of Rimm's study in the Newsweek story causes the blood pressure to rise within Time's top editorial staff. Gone was their "exclusive," or so they thought, despite the fact that Levy had virtually no detailed knowledge of the Rimm paper. Elmer-DeWitt will be made to answer for "the leak" when Time does a postmortem on the story. A critical mass begins to form; Wellites begin to limber up, taking free shots at Time and Elmer-DeWitt ... and all before anyone has seen the story. EFF's Godwin weighs in, the voice of reason: "Let's hold off criticizing Time until we see what the story looks like." And yet, in the coming days, it will be Godwin that rises up as judge, jury, and executioner of Elmer-DeWitt and Time. 25 June, 7:36 p.m. - The feeding begins "The Time article is available on America Online right now," is the single line message posted to Newsweeklies on The Well. A feeding frenzy is about to take place, and the topic will come to resemble a great roiling, shark-infested pool. Time and Elmer-DeWitt are the chum. The events that shake out over the next few days, while localized on The Well, hold significance beyond the San Francisco-based BBS. First, the article's principal author has his virtual "home base" here. Second, The Well will become the focal point of the most intensive and extensive critiques of the Rimm study, a factor that proves invaluable, considering Rimm was successful in bypassing this traditional gauntlet of academia. The early reviews of the Time story are horrendous. Someone suggests that the phrase "Rimm Job" will be used to describe overhyped undergraduate studies that masquerade as major newsmagazine cover stories. Monday, 26 June, O-dark-thirty Elmer-DeWitt logs and posts a comment at 2:38 a.m. PDT. That prompts John Seabrook of The New Yorker magazine to query nearly three hours later: "You're up early. Trouble sleeping?" Monday, 26 June, 7 a.m., Capitol Hill, Senator Grassley's office A Grassley aide gazes wide-eyed at the Time cyberporn cover and smiles broadly. The senator's public relations team begins to churn. With a little luck, they can get some time on the floor of the Senate, and the senator can use the Time report to hammer home support for his anti-child-porn bill. They begin to craft a speech. Someone suggests they call Senator Bob Dole's office to coordinate. Dole is a cosponsor with Grassley on the anti-porn bill. A Grassley staffer says jokingly that maybe they should let the majority leader take the opportunity to pump the bill, using the Time story. "Not bloody likely," says another. "Can you imagine the field day the press would have if Dole waved a Time-Warner publication in front of C-Span" touting it as supporting evidence for one of his bills? Monday afternoon, The Well At 2:39 p.m. PDT, Godwin defines his life for the next eight days by this post: "Philip's story is an utter disaster, and it will damage the debate about this issue because we will have to spend lots of time correcting misunderstandings that are directly attributable to the story." Godwin proceeds to take huge, vicious chunks from the underbelly of the Time article by attacking its least defensible position: the infamous 83.5 percent figure. Godwin will continue to feast at the table of Time for days to come, at times posting several devastating comments in a row. He is a machine. He admits to "obsessing" on the issue, but "I'm obsessing over what is the truth," he tells Muckraker about midnight. He is on the edge of a day too far gone to care about, at the brink of the next too dark to foretell. He has been relentless in his strategic dismantling of Elmer-DeWitt and the Rimm paper. Even his voice sounds tired. But all this takes its toll: Elmer-DeWitt had been a friend. "I feel like something has died," he will say later. And to a large extent, something has. Monday afternoon, Senate floor Senator Grassley, speech in hand, Time magazine at the ready, rises to speak to a virtually empty chamber. Grassley plays the C-Span cameras. He says Time has written about a Carnegie-Mellon University Study" which surveyed "900,000 images." Then Grassley plays the Rimm Factor: "Mr. President, I want to repeat that: 83.5 percent of the 900,000 images reviewed - these are all on the Internet - are pornographic, according to the Carnegie-Mellon study." Meanwhile, the Net is hammering the packaging of the Time story. The shock artwork, which includes a damn-near pornographic image in its own right - what can only be described as a man fucking a computer terminal - is outrageously sensationalistic. Elmer-DeWitt even admits at one point that he agrees with views that the art is "over the top." Monday evening, 9:30 By now Elmer-DeWitt and Time are bloody if not bowed. A crack in Time's story begins to surface. Elmer-DeWitt admits it himself, acknowledging that he "should have had a graph" in the story that referenced the advance criticism of the study. "That was probably a screw up," he writes on The Well. He says he "couldn't risk" giving anyone, such as Hoffman, an advance copy of the study for fear it would "leak." Tuesday, 27 June - The plot moistens Virtually bleeding from a thousand cuts, Elmer-DeWitt acknowledges that the pressure got to him while writing the story. In fact, if he and his team had had more time and "more presence of mind" they would have called in an "outside expert" to review the study, he says. But "presence of mind" was apparently lacking. Elmer-DeWitt admits that he had to go from editing one cover story to writing the next with only the weekend to rejuvenate. "Such is the life at a newsmagazine these days," he writes. Jim Thomas surfs into a Web site that is supposed to carry the Rimm study. What Thomas finds instead is a brief description of the study, a pointer to the law review article and a phone number were you can buy it - not download it. And then he points out a curious note on the page: "Current plans for pages include the Introductory text from this article and the conspiracies which have reached the ears of the researchers." There's no other explanation; shortly, that reference will disappear from the page. Nightline runs its exclusive-by-arrangement segment. Elmer-DeWitt had been taped the previous Friday. Godwin goes head-to-head with Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. Godwin becomes an instant hero: He jumps into the discussion first and is able to play the "family values" card before Reed. But Reed is tossing out facts and figures, as if he has somehow been given an advance copy of the so-secret study. When Rimm is asked by Muckraker whether Reed had some kind of advance peek at the study, Rimm says: "Ralphy never saw the fucking study." Wednesday, 28 June Hoffman appears back on The Well after a two-day absence. She is shocked: in the media topic alone there have been 250 new posts. Hoffman announces that she and Novak, having finally obtained a copy of the study, are beginning a systematic critique of the Rimm report. Six days later the Hoffman/Novak report is complete, all 9,000 words of it. It is devastating. Law Professor David Post cruises onto the Net with his own detailed critique of the Rimm study. He deconstructs Rimm's report in the same manner as the Hoffman/Novak paper. Thursday, 29 June Hoffman discovers that the cryptic Web page message alluding to "conspiracies" is aimed at her. It seems Hoffman is being singled out on the Web site for being a bit too vocal. Hoffman fires off a nasty note to Rimm's faculty advisors at CMU. Several of them answer quickly, including Electrical Engineering Prof Marvin Sirbu, who apologizes for the "conspiracy" language that "has no place in academic discourse." Rimm answers Hoffman, too. He apologizes for the Web page, saying that the person who put it up had done so "accidentally." The Web page goes back to "normal." Friday, 30 June - Monday, 3 July There is not a minute's rest for Elmer-DeWitt. He is constantly hounded whenever he goes online. All this is very tiring for him. Finally, after a long, protracted battle on The Well, Elmer-DeWitt seems to be inching toward defeat, at least on certain points. David Kline, a freelance writer and business columnist for HotWired, logs in and writes that Elmer-DeWitt failed to conduct what he calls "journalistic due diligence" because he didn't investigate the study thoroughly and failed to mention that other experts had raised several doubts. Kline's message has rung the brass bell. The next time Elmer-DeWitt logs in, he cites Kline's message saying: "I think he's put his finger on precisely where I screwed up." Wednesday, 5 July, Los Angeles Rimm finally puts his response to Hoffman's critique of the Time magazine article online. It is not the critique of the Hoffman/Novak dismantling of his study as previously promised. Rimm appears opposite Hoffman on a local Los Angeles National Public Radio show to talk about the study and the groundswell of controversy it has inspired. Rimm goes over the edge, saying that Hoffman has no credentials to critique his study. Hoffman counters his claim, and a spitting match ensues. Rimm then plays his "hidden agenda" card. He whines that Hoffman is "an instrument of the Left," but never explains what he means. And he leaves the show early, citing prior commitments. Hoffman laughs ... and the Net laughs with her. Meeks (finally ... whew) out.... Copyright © 1995 HotWired Ventures LLC All rights reserved.