THE PRESS MUZZLES ITSELF

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

The greatest threat to free speech these days is coming from the most unlikely quarter: journalists. It's happening--where else?--on the Net. A self-appointed council of "industry representatives," including people from the Wall Street Journal, the Newspaper Association of America, CNET, Wired and--no surprise!--Microsoft, is debating whether the online world might be a safer, happier place if a subcommittee of the council decides what's news and what's not. Anything deemed "not news" would be forced to submit to a rating system or risk being blocked by software browsers. And being blocked on the Web could mean extinction for small, independent-minded online publishers--the very folks who have benefited most from the Internet revolution. The whole thing reeks of the powerful beating up on the weak.

The roots of the betrayal go back to June 1996, when the notion of rating Web content first took off. That was when Microsoft forced its myriad Websites to adopt a system that analyzes content according to the degree to which it contains sex, nudity, violence or obscene language. The official reason for this was to make the Net a "safe place" without government censorship--which made sense, I guess, given that the Supreme Court had not yet ruled the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional.

It also made good business sense for Microsoft to adopt an idea that adds value to one of its key products, the Internet Explorer. Explorer is the second most popular browser on the Web; a software component that gives parents the option to filter out the naughty bits is a big selling point.

But what's good business for the software industry is nonsense for journalism--as the folks who run Microsoft's news Website quickly realized. An MSNBC report on the Oklahoma City bombing, for example, would have drawn a prohibitive rating in the violence department.

After about six months, MSNBC quietly stopped rating itself. And that's when we entered the current phase of the debacle. The Internet Content Coalition, co-founded by msnbc general manager Jim Kinsella, proposed a "news exemption" work-around: it would give news sites an N rating, which would keep them above the ratings fray. Of course, to do that you would first have to define news. Is the Village Voice news? The American Civil Liberty Union's Website? The Netly News? We use four-letter functionals now and then (but only where no other, five-letter word will suffice). Screw magazine publishes reviews of upcoming adult videos and lap-dancing parlors. That's news, right? See the problem? Even Merrill Brown, MSNBC's editor in chief, pronounces the whole idea "fundamentally ludicrous."

"I will admit it's a task with a lot of pitfalls," says Neil Budde, editor of the Wall Street Journal's interactive edition and head of the steering committee. Budde says that if his group agrees to go ahead, it will have guidelines and procedures in place by September on how to win the coveted N rating. "We need to be open to what's happening in this medium and not just say we'd never agree to this in print," says Budde. But Paul Steiger, the print Journal's editor, has a better idea: Let anyone who wants to declare themselves a news outlet. "If they're going to let Bill Gates or one of his minions decide, we're not going to participate," he says. Spoken like a true journalist.

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