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Salon: Why I Need to See Child Porn (8/25/06) by Debbie Nathan
Lawrence Matthews, an award-winning freelance journalist who contributed work to a National Public Radio station in Washington, D.C., and articles to the Washington Post, was prosecuted for having downloaded child porn. He claimed he was doing research for a piece on the subject.... Matthews was tried, convicted and incarcerated.
A past reporter on child pornograhy, Nathan is "worried that the government has declared an entire field of law enforcement and public policy off-limits from empirical critique by academia and the fourth estate," and declares that "child porn desperately needs not just journalistic opinion, but journalistic fact as well. We need 1st Amendment access to these images." A historian who "disabled the system in his computer that shows images, and stuck strictly to text" in order to legally research the topic is quoted offering an analogy: "Just imagine if every word we knew about terrorism came from the FBI or the White House." (Ad-viewing required.)
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