For a story about a former porn star who is now volunteering as a local EMT, Roanoke CBS-affiliate WDBJ urged viewers to check out her adult films online.
“The Cave Spring Rescue Squad has been around for more than 60 years. In that time, it’s probably never had a volunteer like Harmony Rose,” WDBJ reporter Justin McLeod told viewers on Thursday. “She’s a former porn star. Just Google her name and you’ll find hundreds of pornographic videos of hers.”
In posting the story on its website, WDBJ included McLeod’s instructions to Google the porn star. The station later removed the line from the post after a commenter pointed out that “encouraging others to google sexually explicit material is shameful.”
Posting about the line on his blog, Jim Romenesko noted:
When I was working for the St. Paul Pioneer Press TECH section in the 1990s, we’d have regular discussions about what URLs we should and shouldn’t hotlink. I seem to recall that we declined to send readers to Playboy.com. Apparently those discussions don’t take place at WDBJ-TV, which is more than happy to help viewers find porn videos.
The original WDBJ article (above) included a hyperlink for “Google” but, since the post has been updated, it’s not clear whether it actually linked to a Google search of Harmony Rose.
>Update: WDBJ news director Dan Dennison emailed TVSpy with the following comment…
We did not encourage people to check out porn on line, nor did our website link to a porn site. Our reporter wrote a line that indicated we found the subject of the story starred in dozens of pornographic films and we found that out by doing a Google search.