CNBC_porn



NEW YORK – What is at present a cool business relationship could (and perhaps should) blossom into a love affair – between CNBC and the adult entertainment industry.

The numbers are in and the progressively edgy business channel scored big with Porn: Business of Pleasure, which was the network’s second highest rated documentary ever.

Don’t look for networks execs take to the 30 Rock roof to serenade the industry any time soon, but the success of this airing has not been lost on interested observers and it certainly won’t be lost on network programmers. The country may be awash in sin, but it obviously wants an extra helping of it along with the news – business or otherwise – and will reward the network that provides it.

The obvious nods to sexing up broadcasts in the form of ever prettier and prettified anchors have been with us for a while, and there’s only so far you can go with that. It was only a matter of time before they took  it to the next level.

Now there’s no turning back. Fox started what is to become a race to see who can be the most aggressively sexy cable news network and NBC is not going to be left in the dust. With the doc, they leapfrogged over anything Fox or any other network has produced, not by creating an accurate look at the porn industry but by shamelessly making kissy-face with it.

It was a disjointed program with far too much crammed into one hour for any of it to coalesce into anything other than a general feeling of acceptance and a vague sense of having been titillated by the experience. Or maybe bored. It was hard to tell.

Mellissa Lee of Fast Money did hosting duties here as well, and seemed all too comfortable as she visited sets, offices, trade shows and all the other porn habitats in her journey through porn land. Her reporting was not very thorough and none of the claims asserted in promos, teasers or even in the program itself were proven or followed up on in the end. None of that seemed to be the point.

In not delivering any of the usual verbal hints or facial tics that indicate a subtext of disapproval, Lee , backed by the network itself,  was allowed to deliver a clear message that pornography, a business that Steve Hirsch said isn’t going anywhere, is like any other business trying to survive in tough times. It may have its detractors – some of whom make wild statements that all porn available on the Internet is illegal – but so do other industries.

In a world in which every business seems to have some element of controversy attached to it, the business of sex hardly stands out as something extraordinary, except with respect to its potential profits. And falling profits was supposedly the premise and underlying reason for making the documentary; an industry that thought it was invulnerable suddenly finds itself on the brink of disaster.

It was a message Steve Hirsch tried to deliver time and again, but it all fell flat in the face of the stories the producers chose to tell and the people they chose to interview. While Samantha Lewis, Joy King, Jesse Jane Hirsch and the rest acquitted themselves well – especially King, who came off as down to earth and very “nice,” as Lee remarked  – no victims of the disaster were to be found, and no evidence of calamity in evidence, as if the industry as people want to imagine it has survived unchanged and intact.

But that’s what happens when you only interview the stars or the heads of big brand companies; you really only get a certain perspective. The problem is that people who don’t know what’s really going on are more influenced by what they see than what they hear. CNBC may have needed to justify its coverage of porn with the angle that the industry is in trouble, but what it delivered in substance tolf a different story.

In the end, that may be a good thing for the industry itself, which does after all survive by fueling fantasies. It’s one thing to say that porn stars are out of work and resorting to escorting and other methods of survival, and that the entire food chain is in dire straits, and quite another to show it.

Of course, to the extent that CNBC does the same thing with every industry it “covers,” it may indeed have a long-term credibility problem, but it is not clear that its executives believe it matters enough to the public for them to care. Numbers such they got for this program will only underscore the point.

Of final note, there was one absolutely glaring element missing from the program, an omission that says more about the state of the business than almost anything else presented during the hour-long show, and that was the exclusion of an interview with Paul Fishbein, founder and president of AVN.

He was there alright, for maybe a second, in the foreground of a shot that focused on Digital Playground’s Samantha Lewis, but that was it and it almost made it all the more poignant that there was nothing more for the man who is almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of a professional adult entertainment industry  acceptable enough to be co-opted by the mainstream.

It was a powerful and almost certainly unintended paradox that makes Porn; Business of Pleasure a memorable marker for those who truly understand where the industry is and where it is headed.