Michael Perkins

A March 23 a Huffington Post headline asserts that:


The facts reported by Huffington Post to support this claim are:

• The Washington Times reported that a dozen SEC workers were caught viewing porn.
• Documents obtained by Gawker suggest that there were sixteen investigations of porn use at the SEC and that porn was viewed over 8000 times. The Huffington Post article doesn't say how many people were responsible for the page views or over what period of time they occurred.

According to a 2005 Harris Interactive poll, 25% of men and 12% of women admit to having viewed porn at work.  I don't know the proportion of men to women at the SEC so let's use the lower number and assume that 12% of the SEC workforce has viewed porn at work.  According to the SEC's site, they have 3500 employees.   If we believe the Harris Interactive poll and if the people at the SEC are like the general population, then we would reasonably expect 420 of them to have viewed porn at work.

The fact that twelve people were caught viewing porn and that sixteen were investigated hardly constitutes a rampant porn problem.  Actually, this is much less than we would expect from an organization of this size.  This is just another example of sensationalist media headlines unsupported by the facts.