A journalist responds

By Ben Curties

Editor, the Gauntlet

[Re: “Boylove” Feature]

Sigh. The Gauntlet has taken what could have been an interesting issue and has gone about it in the laziest, least intelligent way possible.

Instead of an informed discussion of the pedophelia “subculture,” the reader gets a bunch of pro-pedophelia propaganda coupled with a creepy cover. Instead of a balanced look at the issue, including testimony from psychologists and children on how adult-child sex can destroy a child’s life, we get a bunch of unsourced “facts” in favour of pedophilia with no response and only a token discussion on the matter of consent. And the cover, a crayon drawing with a smiling sun beaming down on a smiling child and man about to have sex, certainly sets up a pro-pedophelia stance. What bothers me most is how the staff will likely sit back and smirk at the inevitable firestorm, saying “we just put it out there… you uptight people with your taboos and forbidden topics are so predictable.”

This feature doesn’t offend me as an uptight person, it offends me as a journalist. I could put a bunch of holocaust-denying articles from the net into a paper and claim I’d taken “survey” of a sub-culture, but really I’d have just used a cheap and lazy method of increasing pick-up rates and making people angry. Or I could do a real story involving all sides of the “off-limits” issue, including some sort of fact-checking, and still get all the tasty controversy from an intelligent and journalistically defensible position.