The ad, which is black and white, cost between $100,000-130,000 and was financed by CCV, the Family Research Council, Morality in Media, the Center for Reclaiming America, the American Family Association and Concerned Women for America, to name just a few.
Featuring a remote control, a sample menu of in-room adult entertainment offerings and a pair of handcuffed hands, the ad calls on the Justice Department to more aggressively root out “obscene” content available on pay-per-view in hotels such as Sheraton, Hilton, Holiday Inn, Ritz-Carlton, Hyatt, Marriott and Ramada.
“Adult hardcore pornography can tragically lead to sex crimes against women and children,” the ad reads. “Yet sex videos are available in millions of U.S.-based hotel rooms, which we strongly believe are prosecutable. We call on the Department of Justice to immediately investigate the companies that produce, sell and distribute hardcore porn.”
The ad does not directly mention the names of the hotels that feature porn and instead targets the two biggest providers of adult entertainment to hotel chains, LodgeNet and OnCommand, a subsidiary of Liberty Media Corp.
The website for CCV even goes so far as to call CEOs John Malone of Liberty Media and Scott Petersen of LodgeNet “white collar pornographers.”
Previous efforts to stomp out in-room porn by CCV leader Phil Burress was directed at 15 Ohio and Kentucky hotels that offered their customers in-room porn.
Burress calls adult entertainment in hotels “dangerous” and claims to have been in talks with Justice over the issue of investigating porn in hotel rooms.
“This is not mere nudity,” Burress said. “We’re talking about every conceivable form of degrading, distorted sex. We’re talking about the types of material, which are addictive in nature, which men are lured into viewing in the privacy of their hotel rooms, and which have been responsible for sexual crimes and for the breakdown of countless marriages, families and careers. And we’re talking about a company and its leader who care more about the dollar than about those men, women, children and families.”
According to statistics provided in the ad, adult entertainment is available in 40 percent of hotels in the U.S., which equals out to 1.5 million hotel rooms. In-room porn nets distributors hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
In response to the ads, several hotel chains responded by defending their choice to supply porn to hotel guests simply because it can be easily blocked by guests who are not interested in viewing it.
The conservative groups also are trying to spur traffic to website CleanHotels.com, which provides a listing of hotels that have banned porn.
