The Epic Times Battle Over Child Porn (and Profits) 38096

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt got out his Champ HP3 Blender and stirred some shit up on Sunday when he called out T magazine for blurring the line between editorial and advertising in a way that would get other section editors fired. Oh, and he called them out on running a photo spread where 17-year-old model Ali Michael bares her left breast, in the way that Lindsay Lohan casually does when she runs out of two-sided tape.

“One sequence shows her ‘wearing’ a $3,890 blue taffeta coat by John Galliano,” writes Hoyt. “I say ‘wearing’ because the coat is bunched around her waist so that you can???t really tell what it is. She has her back to the camera and nothing else on. In one image, she is turned slightly, showing the outline of a bare breast, out of focus.”

Was it child pornography? Or high fashion-slash-art? The shoot cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce, so maybe … either? BOTH? Today, Keith Kelly makes sure the week doesn’t pass without an update on the internal Times feud that’s caught the world, or Eighth Avenue, by storm!

For what it’s worth, Ali’s mother MaryAnn didn’t seem to think it was anything too improper. She calls her daughter modest.

Times exec editor Bill Keller, meanwhile, maintains that he did see the Holiday Issue the photos appeared in, but didn’t have the photos pointed out to him, nor did they “register” with him.

So what’s Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati to do? Offensive defense, people! In a memo to staff printed in part by Kelly, he writes:

I will leave aside the purported central question of whether the photograph was appropriate to run or not, though as I said on Friday to [T magazine editor] Jim Schachter – who was terrific in calm, thoughtful defense of publishing the pictures – the standards wardens here would have been the very people 100 years ago to have been made apoplectic by a Renoir nude.

I say purported because it seems clear from the public editor’s way of getting into his column that he is offended not simply by the photo (about which people can disagree) but rather by T in general – that the magazine’s elegant ad mixture of beauty, sensuality, luxury and God forbid, profitability, offends a moral code at the very heart of journalism and, especially, journalism as practiced at the New York Times.

This kind of thinking would strike me as hilarious if it were not so sad, and to you, I fear hurtful.

And also, the kiddie porn industry is a $20 billion (or is it $3 billion?) a year business. T is generating just $4 to $5 million a year in ad revenue. If they were really in the business of sexualizing minors, wouldn’t they have figured out a way to better monetize things?