Porn as a Stepping Stone, by Evan Wright

(View entire post here)

I had a high opinion of the mainstream media when I worked at Hustler magazine. I recognized that what we produced at Hustler was mostly garbage, and believed that what was published in serious newspapers and magazines was both truthful and beneficial to the greater good. Journalistically speaking, I had low self-esteem.  My perception changed when I went to for Seth Warshavsky's Internet Entertainment Group, the subject of chapter nine, "Portrait of a Con Artist."  I'm not saying necessarily that my self esteem rose. But my esteem for the mainstream press plunged enough that eventually everything came into alignment, and I stopped comparing my work to that of all other journalists affiliated with respected institutions.

When I started working for Warshavsky he was a highly-regarded figure in the media.  The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and others hailed him as a visionary, a young man who had bested much larger enterprises by pioneering e-commerce. It didn't matter that he was a purveyor of "adult content." He was an innovator and besides, he reassured the press that porn was a stepping stone. Soon, he would turn his business into the Viacom of the Internet. 

As I detail in "Portrait of a Con Artist," soon after I began work for Warshavsky, I quickly learned that his business was in shambles. It was so bad that fellow employees worried we would wind up in jail for participating in such a grand fraud. But we watched as a parade of reporters, as well as financial experts from leading American banks and accounting firms, came to the company headquarters to note and disseminate the lies being told about the firm. Their motives were clear. Reporters wanted to be able to tell the incredible story of Warshavsky's rise--since it was a great tale, even if untrue--and the financial experts wanted to be able to sign off on a stock offering. The experts and the journalists did not knowingly collude to deceive anyone so far as I saw, but it worked out that the financial people often cited press accounts when they talked up the soundness of the firm, and the press accounts often quoted financial experts to validate the claims of fantastic success made by Warshavsky. The result was a grand swindle. At the time I wrote in a private email to a friend, "I have lost all faith in American journalism."

Evan Wright, Hella Nation, Putnam, Penguin Books