Dan Fisher, veteran legal eagle at Forbes Magazine today takes up the case of down-trodden alternative-weekly The Villiage Voice, which like Craig's List before it stands accused of abetting child prostitution and slavery thanks to its "Backpage.com" racy classified section.
HIs article was spurred by a hit-piece in The New York Times by Nick Kristof which can be found here.
Dan's piece gets at the heart of The Voice's defense:
Since posters also supply credit-card numbers, it isn’t hard in most cases for police to track down who places those ads. (The advertiser in the Kristof case wrote a plain-vanilla personal ad for “labor day weekend fun” with a 21-year-0ld, but his credit card number allowed him to be quickly identified, Backpage says.) The Backpage executive said the company responds to about 100 subpoenas a month, and dispatched an employee to testify before a grand jury called by the Brooklyn prosecutor Hersh as recently as September.
It's a tricky journalistic effort to defend companies accuses of crimes like that and Fisher, who is an attorney as well as a reporter, does a great job of making the argument that Kristof's article doesn't hold water. He argues that there is no way to stop this activity altogether and by shutting down places that play fair with enforcement bodies, it only shifts the activity to even less savory places.
The Voice is engaged in a dirty business and its fair game for journalists to point that out but when accusations are this serious, they really should have the goods before calling for government action.
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