TV Station Educates Public Teen Sexting Dangers by Exposing 14-Year-Old’s Name… and Penis

(This post originally appeared at Techdirt)

According to a recently-filed lawsuit, the media is apparently every bit as “helpful” as law enforcement when it comes to the responsible, logical handling of teens and sexting. Confusing “hurting” with “helping,” Colorado’s KOAA allegedly exposed not only the name of a teen involved in a sexting incident, but also the part that puts the “sex” in “sexting.”

The station, KOAA TV, aired footage of the boy’s erect penis during a news report that was put together after his father’s girlfriend approached producers about an alleged blackmail attempt, according to a complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court.

Producers were told on Feb. 24 by the woman that someone had tried to blackmail the teen, now 16, using sexually explicit material. That same day they arrived at the family house in Pueblo, Colorado to investigate the claims and interview the boy’s father, Elijah Holden. While on assignment, the suit alleges that the news team collected screenshots from the teen’s Facebook page, as well as images from the YouTube page where the blackmail video had been uploaded, to be used in their coverage.

The plaintiff and his father both asked that the name “be kept confidential through any report presented by Defendant KOAA,” attorney Matthew Schneider said in the filing.

Since law enforcement largely seems to feel sexting = child porn, the station should have found itself under investigation for distributing child porn. Instead, the only negative result of its allegedly terrible editorial practices so far is Holden’s lawsuit.

(Read more at Techdirt)