Sex And The Missing PBS Link

The PBS MediaShift blog has an article discussing the Google / Sex Blogs incident. More interesting than the main article (summary: Bug. Fixed, they say. Google has lots of power.) is the controversy that erupted because of a decision not to link to the sex blogs quoted and discussed in the story.

A number of people have asked why there aren't links to the sex blogs mentioned in this post. If Google had been blocking the blogs, then there would have been links included. But because anyone can easily find the blogs through a search on Google, PBS.org felt it was not necessary to include the links here and risk offending some readers who might not expect to find links to explicit sites on PBS.org.

I ask that you as MediaShift readers please leave comments below explaining what you think the link policy should be here and elsewhere on mainstream media sites and blogs. Should we link to explicit material and how should that be handled? Should we include a warning before the links? Which links are OK and which are not? Your thoughts would be appreciated and I hope to return to this issue in a more in-depth way on the blog. PBS editors, who are involved in this issue, tell me they are very much open to your suggestions.

Now, as a statement of fact, "search on Google" is a cop-out here. Most of the time people don't even click on links right in front of them, much less do a search. And given that the article itself discusses the power that Google has over people being able to find sites, it's very ironic to be deferring to it after a long column about the consequences of a glitch.

Moreover, in the thread, people are pointing out examples where PBS.org did link to sexually explicit sites in other cases.

Look, if you didn't want to take the flak from right-wingers, that's understandable. Maybe not laudable, but comprehensible. Otherwise, I'd say standard web practice is unequivocal on the issue, that readers should be immediately referred to the sites discussed. I don't see any reason to override that convention - for sites that are trolling for traffic and manufacturing controversy, maybe you don't want to give it to them (but any real guilty parties in this case wouldn't care about a link from PBS.org). So put a warning about content next to the link if you must (though I think context makes it very clear). But otherwise, well, I'm now left with a lot of sympathy for why the sex bloggers tended to think Google was deliberately removing them.

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)