Are you a parent concerned that your child may have easy access to communist and pornographic materials? If so, you may be shocked, devastated and appalled to learn that your innocent children "are using a gaming device to access porn out of thin air." The PSP, which is a short for PlayStation "pornable", is a portable game console that has the capability of "magically displaying images of naked women." Yeah, that's right. Fox 9, a local news affiliate of Fox News, the world standard for balanced and fair reporting, has revealed that the PSP is entirely capable of displaying images and therefore porn. As a result, Sony and the PSP are entirely to blame if your kid sticks pictures of naked ladies onto the device. Bleurgh.This article has it all: a sensational headline, wildly outlandish claims and a healthy dose of out-of-context quotes from family institutes. What's next? The Nintendo DS steals your precious bodily fluids? Xbox 360 responsible for failure to find WMDs? Playing too much Halo lowers exam results? Wait... that last one's true.
[Via Game|Life] [Update: Fox 9 is a local news affiliate of Fox News, not a purely investigative news channel.]













(Page 1) Reader Comments
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Dirk, you don't think local affiliate are subject to the mission of the corporation they are a part of? I would think they ARE as it makes sense from the business perspective.
The report certainly stretches the truth, I feel sorry for the kid (perhaps this should be plural) who is going to have his PSP taken away because of an overreacting and/or uninvolved parent.
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More than likely, this story was ran around a sweeps period to garner attention. The Atlanta stations do crap like this all the time. They even had one reporter taser himself.
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If you change "Fox News" to "any news organization" then I'll agree with ya.
And its ok, people who whine about fox news and talk radio have been feelin sad since their pals the Soviets lost control over in Russia, so give them a break.
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Local affiliates share somewhat with the national affiliates but the station owner and station news director make the ultimate choice on what stories to run.
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-A felony? for what... getting a woodie in class?
... come on now Johnny, you have to stop looking at pictures of women without clothing and use your PSP to play games where you murder people and blow stuff up.
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A case where that is not at all what the law was created for and local authorities decide to "make an example out of" a relatively innocent kid.
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Media without hypervenalating hysteria does not exist in the USA-------------anywhere. 90% of it amounts to cheap shots and non-news. Take it too seriously and
you'll blow a fuse.
By the way, Can you not play porn on your PSP?
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I work in the news media (in newspapers, not TV, though I have friends who work in TV). The parent company's involvement in day-to-day news coverage and news decisions is nil. Local affiliates and local newspapers have their own people (who actually live in the communities we cover) who make these decisions/do editing/etc. Occasionally, Fox News might make available newscasts for local affiliates to run, but even then, the decision whether to run or skip the stuff lies with the affiliate.
(I can only think of one example of affiliates being ordered to air a news program, and it didn't happen at Fox. During the last presidential election, 62 stations owned by Sinclair were ordered to air a partisan "documentary" about John Kerry. An imbroglio ensued.)
Can you imagine how inefficient it would be to run every article up the corporate flagpole? No one would make a dime.
This is a classic case of the local news being ignorant. Nothing more.
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Yeah instead of blaming the school for having 1) an unsecure wireless network & 2) having non-filtered internet, it's the kids fault for taking advantage of that situation. Sure porn doesn't belong in school, but how about actually taking some steps to prevent students from pulling it up at school.
And I'm so sick of parents & organizations blaming everyone else for their kid being corrupted. Wake up parents! Take responsibility, they are YOUR kids. Be educated, don't buy some crap that you don't even know what can do. These days with the internet, there's no excuse to not be educated.
If we're going to blame Sony for anything, it should be for not making enough good games for the PSP. If we had good games, we would be playing them instead of looking up porn, well most of the time anyway.
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The week after they aired this story, they had another one that was title something like "Downtown MInneapolis at War" and took isolated events that happened over the course of a year and made them seem as if they were happening every single day.
I watch their stories to get a good laugh and then do the exact opposite of what they say not to do.
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What parents should take away is that many portable devices have the same risks as PCs.
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Dr. Perry Cox, from Scrubs and possibly one of the greatest television characters ever, summed it up perfectly. "If all of the porn was taken off the Internet, there would only be one site left, and it would say 'Bring back the porn!'"
Anyway, yeah. This is ridiculous. Jack Thompson, assemble!
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Exactly! It's not the manufacturer who is to blame, but the user or the parents.
I remember a while back when some kids were caught putting bleach in super-soakers, and some idiot parent-group started a movement to illegalize super-soakers.
Give me a break.
If a kid beats someone over the head with a baseball bat, should we make the bat illegal?
I'll be willing to bet that those same parents go to church every Sunday, but I'll bet none of them ever blame the apple from the Garden of Eden.
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Anyway this is how companies sell stories.
Of course there is more than one boy out there, watching porn in his PSP in the bathroom, so he can squirt the duck.
"Sony, the maker of the PSP, told us that parents should be responsible for monitoring the content their children are viewing."
That`s certainly right.
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Someone should make a horror movie about how the media industry works. If you thought zombies feeding on people's guts was terrifying, then take a look at Bill O'Reilly's face!
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This just proves the old adage - give something access to the Internet, and someone will put porn on it. I can't wait for the Internet-capable toaster. Partly because I want to see people bemoaning toaster porn, and partly because I can't wait for the Darwin Award winner who decides to get funky with the four-slice.
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is anyone else getting tired of playing mario and zelda games on the nintendo consoles not that there not good games
its just that nintendo hasnt had a new hit game in a while except RE4
they need to come out with some new killer games if they wanna bring in some new fanboys
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Join me in my campaign to make hardcore porn available in school libraries and on classroom computers! And until that day, keep your porn easily accessible, for your children's sake. They're going to have sex ONE day; help them be the BEST they can be.
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As for this news article, it's about as legit as that "DS used as pedophile magnet" report done a few months back. ie. It's full of sensasionalist garbage.
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is anyone else getting tired of playing mario and zelda games"
A bit off topic? You're not even in the same solar system.
DarkMavis: The Fox affiliate here in Las Vegas is also the biggest joke in town. They did an in-depth investigation on the veracity of the 5-second rule.
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So slagging off the absolutely undeniably most biased 'news' corporation in the democratic world means I'm a communist. Actually no, it means I believe in the central tenets of democracy far more strongly than an ignorant little redneck like yourself can hope to comprehend!
Fox News: goose-stepping you all the way to fascism.
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I had a fun time blogging about that one.
http://my.1up.com/do/blogEntry?publicUserId=5464605&bId=6554571
Fox 9 News = Senesationalist Bu!!$#!T.
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People are using text to send porn.
(. y .) - Boobies
( ; ) - Butts
!!OMFG!!
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Are you telling me that because this is a local news outlet that the corporation as a whole somehow has no responsibility for this crapfest? Please.
"the story from Fox 9 was sensationalist, but it explained the problem in terms its audience understands."
What the hell sort of audience is this targeted at? People from the stone age?! You have an extremely low idea of what people are like if you think using words like "magic", "from thin air" and "pornable" are explaining it in terms that people will understand. Talk about dumbing down!
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You all clamor for parents to be more responsible with their childrens gaming...
Then a story comes on that lets parents know their kids can use the PSP to access porn, which will cause some parents to more closely monitor what their kids are doing...
And THAT'S bad too?
*scratches head*
They sensationalize the story to get ratings. All stations do that. The Simpson parody it with the classic "A brand of soda causes death... we'll tell you which one at 6!" Plus, they're giving useful information.
Stop thinking that ANYTHING negative related to video games is wrong. Please. You come off like crazy basement-dwelling fanboys. Which I realize some, but not all, of us are.
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Fox 9: Local Fox broadcast affiliate in Minneapolis. Broadcasts maybe an hour of news coverage a day, runs regular programming. Independently run at the local level.
Fox News: Cable TV 24-hour news network in New York. Nothing at all to do with Fox 9 other than having the same parent company and maybe providing the occasional national story reported from someplace that Fox 9 doesn't have the resources to cover.
(Given that this article quotes someone from the Elk River, MN, school district, near Minneapolis, I'm guessing this article didn't come from the New York folks.)
I realize that even though I work in the news media and know how this stuff works, nothing I say will convince people who believe there's some sort of vast, centrally planned news media conspiracy. However, your claim that Fox 9 is an investigative spin-off of Fox News is just plain false. And the documentation for this is pretty much irrefutable.
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I did admit in my initial post that the story was sensational so I didn't give the news station a pass on the reporting. The "magic" and "thin air" comments shouldn't have been used, but I think the "playstation pornable" is pretty clever at getting the point across. I don't care for the PSP though so that probably makes me sensational and biased too though, right?
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Redneck and Fascist? You're wrong on both accounts.
I wonder how many stories this site has run about Hillary Clinton and Joe Liberman's anti-videogame crusades. This isn't really the best place for any of that type of talk though, you know, videogame site and all.
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Seriously, dude. Saying that Fox News is responsible for this in any way is like saying that they're responsible for or 20th Century Fox's movies, just because the movie house happens to have Fox in the name.
Jeez, man. This is still a great post. That Fox 9 article is ridiculous. But you've got a huge factual error in it, and instead of acknowledging it and thanking those of us who are trying to improve Joystiq, you're wrong-headedly standing up on this huge, "No, I'm right!" soapbox. We point the error out b/c we care about the site and its accuracy, not because we're out to make you look dumb. Stop being so defensive and look at the facts.
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With all due respect, you are not correct. As a previous poster mentioned, if all stories went up the corporate flagpole, there'd be no time to do anything.
The fact of the matter is...other than the name, the network has absolutely NOTHING to do with the affiliate. How do I know this? I work for an ABC affiliate.
It has the ABC logo everywhere and we are called an ABC station, but my news director is the one who assigns stories and tells me what angle to take it from. He doesn't go to ABC to find out what assignments he should give us. He decides. The only itneraction we have with ABC, is sometimes they want some of our footage for the national wire. That's it. We don't get weekly phone calls from them. They don't care what we cover.
No interaction.
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Like it or not buddies, Fox News and Fox 9 (and therefore this bullshit article) are both products of the same corporation. I think you two owe me an apology.
http://www.kmsp.com/legal/privacypolicy.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KMSP-TV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Television_Stations_Group
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