Garance Franke-Ruta: Misguided, Dishonest, and Wrong

Garance Franke-Ruta forgets the first rule of getting out of a hole one has dug oneself into: Stop digging!

She continues to defend her pathologically stupid proposal to raise the age of consent for erotic performance to 21 in a post at Tapped with the deeply ironic title "The Self-Correcting Blogosphere":

Current law does not punish those who are under 18 who participate in porn or streak at their high school football games (except to the extent they get fined for public indecency), and there would be no legal justification for punishing older teens who do so, either, in the unlikely event the age limit for participating in porn were raised.

I guess Tapped, the official blog of The American Prospect, does not have a fact-checker on staff. It didn't take very long for the "self-correcting blogosphere" to correct Franke-Ruta: Current law does indeed punish minors who participate in porn. Atrios posted examples of such prosecutions in recent news, and so did commenter rea at Matthew Yglesias's blog.

The same corrections of this fundamental error of fact that is crucial to Franke-Ruta's argument also appeared over and over again in the comments to her post at Tapped. Franke-Ruta replied to some of her commenters; but she studiously avoided either printing a retraction or acknowledging the fundamental error of fact in her response in the comments.

Franke-Ruta is not the stereotypical blogger in a bathrobe; she is a professional journalist, an editor at The American Prospect. Professional journalists should be held to professional standards, like checking one's facts before publishing, and correcting one's facts afterwards.

(NB: Ordinarily, I don't explain my references and jokes, but I think I ought to now: The title of this post is intended to echo the title of Gayle Rubin's essay "Misguided, Dangerous and Wrong: an Analysis of Anti-pornography Politics," originally written in 1986 and included in the book Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism, Alison Assiter and Avedon Carol, eds., Pluto Press, 1993. I am not a newcomer to the feminist examination of pornography; the immediate evidence suggests that I'm rather more familiar with it than is Franke-Ruta.)