We thought we were going crazy when we heard that the entertainment industry rag of record Variety had a porn blog called The Porning Report, written by AVN Online Associate Editor Frank Meyer. By the time we got there (Sir Rodney is, alas, tragically unhip) it was long dead (it only ran from November 2003 til March 2004), with a few RIPs posted on the message board.

With witty, short entries (much like Sir Rodney’s, if we do say so ourselves) like “Will Mickey Get a Hickey” , “The FCC Goes F**king Crazy”, and “Janet Jackson gets Nasty”, Meyer spent less than half a year respectfully connecting the dots for those oh-so-square Hollywoodites who make Sir Rodney look positively au courante. We were going to add our own RIP message but the boards at the venerated trade rag had closed on the subject, so we share our bon mots with you here:

The mainstream entertainment conglomerates, especially Fox and Time Warner, make 100s of millions off of porn through their cable and satellite holdings. It is the diritest open secret in the business. Fox sells tens of millions of dollars of pay per view porn (taking a whopping 50% of gross) via Direct TV, and then decries the spread of porn on Fox News. I guess “Network” and “Wag the Dog” were closer to truth than fiction after all Time Warner cable is chock full o’ porn, too, though the repression of porn is not an obsession of their news outlets, Time or CNN. It could be argued that Time Warner sees the value in hyping porn, since they use porn a plenty to sell stories, attract clicks, and make newsstand sales. Oh, and let’s not forget Time Warner owned pornotopia, AOL, which is responsible for the vast majority of naughty chat in the known universe. And let’s not even get into Terry Semel’s Yahoo, whose principal business is selling advertising to porn sites like ours.

Porn sites probably account for 50% of their ad sales. That, my friends, is why Frank’s column has gone away. Variety is a trade rag, not a news magazine, and as such you will never find them biting the proverbial hands that feed it.

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