The “pornography for war gore” story that is in the New York Times, Guardian and the London Metro today is an excellent example of a story flowing between the blogosphere and mainstream news outlets.

The story, about soliders apparently trading grisly digital camera snaps of dead Iraqis and Afghans for access to the Amsterdam-based pornographic web site nowthatsfuckedup.com, was first brought to the world’s attention in October, 2004, when the the the sex blog Fleshbot noticed it (thanking “Chris” for the tip). A few days later, the New York Post reported that the Pentagon was investigating the site, which apparently included naked photographs of female American soldiers.

The story disappeared (almost completely) until Italian blogger Staib noticed the site in late August. His post was picked up by the Italian news agency ANSA, whose reports ended up in both major Italian papers, La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera.

German technology news site Heise picked up the story, but strangly, no English-speaking journalists seemed to pick it up, but bloggers like Nur-al-Cubicle, Xer-files (who provided contact details for the site’s owner, Chris Wilson), Sabbah, and Helena Cobban’s Just World News. (I chickened out at the time because I couldn’t confirm it to my satisfaction).

From there, it went to the Online Journalism Review, which fleshed out many new details. This was this was then picked up by the California alternative weekly the East Bay Express and then left wing American magazine The Nation (without much attribution).

AmericaBlog began covering gore-for-porn on Monday.
But news stories often need formally-constituted civil society groups to speak out before they can be framed as a bona fide political conflict. And so, the story finally hit the big time when the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations publically complained to the Pentagon.

What’s surprising about this is that the story was already in the mainstream media in August — albeit in Italian — but it took the intervention of the blogosphere to ensure that it was translated and thereby placed on the news agenda of the English-speaking mass media.

The webmaster, Wilson, told the East Bay Express about the media coverage of his site:

… In the wake of the Post’s stories, Wilson says, he was bombarded with requests for interviews from newspapers and radio stations. Even after he began posting photographs of corpses late last year, media inquiries focused exclusively on his nudie pics. It wasn’t until reporters from the European press contacted him in early September that anyone took notice of Wilson’s snuff-for-porn arrangement with American troops.

“The soldiers thing, I think the Italians picked it up first,” Wilson says. “I’ve done interviews with the Italians, the French, Amsterdam. … They were very critical, saying the US wouldn’t pick it up, because it’s such a sore spot. … It raises too many ethical questions. … I started to laugh, because it’s true.”