There’s nothing more conservative than a successful revolution, as the saying goes.
Take The Village Voice — and, by extension, the Seattle Weekly.
Born in 1955 in Greenwich Village in New York City — Norman Mailer was one of the founders — The Village Voice served as a vibrant alternative to the mainstream media, as did the Seattle Weekly after its launch by David Brewster in 1976.
Now, of course, Village Voice Media, headquartered in Phoenix, Ariz., owns both, plus 11 other “alt-weeklies” around the country.
And as a corporate player, Village Voice Media has been purveyor of the notorious Backpage.com, home of underage sex trafficking and prostitution.
It’s a sad, sordid arc from bright, journalistic beginnings to the Village Voice Media of today, which has proved to be as cynical and rapacious as the worst corporate entities their newspapers delight in taking on — at one point, Goldman Sachs had a minority stake in the enterprise.
Backpage.com was spun off last September to a pair of Village Voice Media’s controlling shareholders. It was a transparently craven, corporate move when the heat got to be too much for Village Voice Media and its multimillion-dollar baby, Backpage.com.
Last Friday, the state Attorney General’s Office announced it will no longer defend in federal court the Engrossed Senate Bill 6252, passed in Olympia earlier this year. State Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles was one of the sponsors of the law, aimed directly at Backpage.com, which required on-line advertising companies to verify the ages of those appearing in sex-related advertisements.
Backpage.com and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet advocacy group, challenged the law on several grounds. A U.S. District judge ruled the law violated the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that shields on-line providers from what its subscribers might do or say.
A new law is sorely needed.
Well before the September spinoff, Village Voice Media had promised to patrol its on-line, sex-related ads for underage victims — those promises were empty.
Last summer, the Seattle Police Department found plenty of underage sex activity on the site under the moniker “escort services.”
No doubt, some of the people at Village Voice Media and Backpage.com have daughters, but what the heck — they’re serving a market. It’s not pretty watching white-collar pimps defending the indefensible.
It’s time the state recalibrates and comes back with sharper law that will pass judicial muster.
In the meantime, we salute Kohl-Welles’ efforts and those of Attorney General Rob McKenna and Mayor Mike McGinn.
McGinn, you’ll recall, took on Seattle Weekly when it was still wedded to Backpage.com. The mayor has been on target on this one.[[In-content Ad]]
