WASHINGTON — Several publications within the right-wing media ecosystem amplified, during the last news cycle, the current Republican push for age verification on websites displaying adult content.
Breitbart.com, the Tucker Carlson-owned Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner all published simultaneous pieces in the last 48 hours concerning copycat bills in state legislatures in the wake of the successful passage of Louisiana’s age verification mandate.
This blitz follows the unusually candid admission on Tuesday by one of the bills’ sponsors that the state initiatives are stepping stones to an ultimate goal of a federal requirement to provide proof of age before accessing pornographic content online.
As XBIZ reported, Arkansas State Senator Tyler Dees (R-Siloam Springs) told Motherboard tech reporter Samantha Cole, “My hope is that we protect children and their innocence in [the] state of Arkansas and then send a message across the country that we need something similar built into federal law as well.”
Dees’ own Senate Bill 66, which proposes a “Protection of Minors from Distribution of Harmful Material Act,” is a copycat version of Louisiana’s Act 440, a new law enacted in January after being championed by a religious anti-porn activist Republican legislator.
The right-wing echo-chamber campaign kicked off with a more measured take by the Washington Examiner, which was then swiftly escalated into pseudo-editorials stoking moral panic in Breitbart and the Daily Caller.
The FSC Responds to the Washington Examiner
The Examiner accurately reported that the Louisiana law has “spawned a flurry of copycat bills,” adding that many of those bills had across-the-aisle support and highlighting that the Democratic-majority Virginia Senate passed its version of the bill after a bipartisan vote.
The Examiner then noted, “The pro-pornography Free Speech Coalition has set up a tracker on its website to monitor states that have introduced age-verification bills. The group says it is also ‘strategizing responses with our First Amendment attorneys’ for responding to the legislative efforts.”
FSC provided a statement to the conservative Washington, D.C. paper, pointing out that the proposed age verification bills are “ineffective, a disaster for privacy, and blatantly unconstitutional.”
“No one in the adult industry wants minors on our sites,” the FSC wrote. “Within our own homes, we use device-level filters — our sites already register with databases such as RTA ( Restricted to Adults ) and are easily blocked by such filters — and other methods to keep adult content for adults.”
FSC added that filters “are not only more effective, they don't entail government surveillance of our browsing history or risk identity theft. If lawmakers want to know how to effectively keep minors from accessing adult content, while still preserving the rights of adults to access legal content, we're more than happy to be part of that discussion."
The Washington Examiner piece appears under the site’s “Faith, Freedom, Self-Reliance” section, which is headed by a declaration of principles touting individual responsibility and calling for government to “get out of the way.” Yet throughout 2020 and 2021, the Examiner platformed Exodus Cry mouthpiece Laila Mickelwait as a regular opinion columnist, downplaying the religious motivation of her anti-porn organization, an offshoot of controversial Missouri ministry, International House of Prayer.
The Washington Examiner is owned, through his Clarity Media Group, by 83-year-old billionaire Philip Anschutz, a devout Christian and regular donor to conservative political causes. One of the causes Anschutz has “generously supported” is crusading anti-porn group NCOSE, which the billionaire has been backing since the organization went by its previous name, Morality in Media. Another is the Family Research Council, a lobby that also serves as a clearinghouse for political donations to conservative Christian politicians like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley.
Breitbart Puts ‘Legitimate’ Stamp on Anti-Porn Campaign
Yesterday, influential right-wing news portal Breitbart.com ran the tendentious headline, “States Across the Country Look to Protect Children from Pornography” above a stock photograph of an unsupervised child innocently glancing at a cellphone.
“Sixteen state governments either plan to or have enacted legitimate age verification requirements to access pornography sites in an effort to protect children from the harmful content,” Breitbart’s Breccan Thies reported.
Besides Louisiana’s bill, the article celebrated copycat proposals in Virginia, West Virginia, Arkansas, Florida, South Dakota, Mississippi and Kansas, while lauding Texas, South Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Oklahoma, Utah, Arizona and Missouri, which the outlet reported either implemented other methods or “plan to introduce other verification requirements.”
The Breitbart report also dismissed any opposition to these measures as actions by “some pro-pornography groups,” which “under the guise of ‘free speech’ are challenging the bills both legally and as part of a public relations campaign.” Thies implicitly questioned the sincerity of the FSC’s statement to the Washington Examiner that “No one in the adult industry wants minors on our sites.”
The FSC has called the current Republican campaign against adult material online, including the copycat age verification schemes, “the most aggressive censorship we’ve seen in decades.”
The Breitbart piece then concludes by asserting that “studies show” pornography use “warps one’s perception of reality, how individuals view loved ones, and brings about significantly higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress” and describing the pornography industry as “rampant with sex trafficking and child sexual abuse.”
Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller Joins the Panic Blitz
Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller repeated basic reporting about the bills before embedding tweets strongly condemning all adult content.
“Many social conservatives view restriction of online porn as a priority and an important way to protect children,” the Daily Caller piece contextualized.
The outlet then reproduced a December 2022 tweet by the architect of the Louisiana bill, religious activist, “porn addiction” therapist and Republican legislator Rep. Laurie Schlegel, who declared, “Online pornography is extreme and graphic and only one click away from our children. This is not your daddy’s Playboy. And if pornography companies refuse to be responsible, then we must hold them accountable. This law is a first step.”
Schlegel addressed her tweet to NCOSE, conservative broadcaster Matt Walsh and Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chief proponent of a federal definition of obscenity that would revert the country to a pre-1973 censorship status quo.
If Lee's proposed Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, which aims to “establish a national definition of obscenity,” succeeds, and sexual content loses the free-speech protections that have stood for the last 50 years, that legal experts fear would open the door for the government to prosecute every creator or distributor of adult content.
