How a TV Station Convinced The Internet They Don't 'Get It'

One of the most-distributed television stations just gave a lesson on how to find pornography. Think that’s a problem? Here’s a bigger one: WGN Chicago figured if they deleted their reference to it and denied involvement, it would cease to exist.

As of August 2013, Chicago’s broadcast TV Channel 9 WGN America was available in almost 74 million pay television households in the United States. WGN is perhaps the most Influence-y television broadcast outlet, and a couple of days ago ran a story about how youthful offenders in Illinois could get their criminal records expunged. But then something went very, very wrong. The person showing the web site used for that trick accidentally exposed an affinity for porn, and those 74 million households received a tip on where to find a load of free pornography.

And speaking of loads, this story holds loads of examples of how Influency works.

Let’s start with the obvious: unless WGN was seeking to become the world’s utmost authority on pornography, letting a piece run on their airwaves that included this veritable how-to-find-porno reference was just plain stupid. And we can address that quickly: WGN had no such intention or they wouldn’t have deleted reference to the piece from their web site.

Maybe WGN’s pornography expertise is still buried somewhere. But search WGN’s site for ‘expunge’ ‘expungeio’ or ‘expunge.io’, at least one of which would represent the correct way to search for the story that WGN’s foray into porn spawned, and you come up empty. So let’s talk to Influency point #2: having become the world’s largest pointer to pornography, someone at WGN then decided it would be a good idea to claim no such error had occurred. This would make someone at WGN not just dumb, but intentionally and overtly deceptive.

Check out this story at AOL Jobs for more detail on the WGN porno mess.

Wait a second; AOL Jobs?

In proof that not quite everything Tim Armstrong oversees is worthless, someone at AOL Jobs has enough of a sense of humor to have written about the WGN Pornography story. Of course, like us, the only real business purpose of AOL Jobs writing about the WGN Porn debacle is to gain a leg up in the search engine optimization wars.

That said (and with purpose stated clearly), let’s talk a bit more about pornography.

As quite a few of the comments on the piece at AOL Jobs point out, pornography is not just commonplace but probably the most popular use of the Internet. Whatever one’s personal opinion of either porn’s popularity or the propriety of that situation, it’s reality, and Yahoo! legitimized porn when it bought Tumblr. Sure, you can fight it as Microsoft does with its official position on how you use their Skydrive service, or as Google does by refusing to run AdWords ads on pages they believe are about pornography. But denying your documented-if-unintentional promotion of pornography? That’s not the way Influency works, WGN.

And oh yeah: maybe you’ve noticed that because of my liberal use of the word “pornography” in this piece, some of our Adwords ads aren’t running here. Wonder how that’s possible? Remember this story about <H1> Tags? In this case, that level of Influency is being trumped by the same kind of filter I mentioned in the passage about expunge.io and WGN, above, and in the story here.

By the way: this picture includes a link to another story at the WGN web site that speaks about pornography; let’s see if this porno story survives WGN self-censorship and revisionist history.