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For a penny-ante porn site, Hunting For Bambi received extraordinary media attention this summer. In early July it was hard to find any reference to Hunting For Bambi on the Internet. A month later, a Yahoo search produced over 37,000 results, and there have been features about the site on every national news channel. Yet, since Hunting For Bambi was a hoax, why did the story ever reach the national news in the first place?

Hunting For Bambi was established in June 2003 to sell an amateurish video, in which "hunters" with paintball guns stalk naked young women through the Nevada desert. The video was represented on the site, not only as a commodity in its own right, but also as a promotional device for actual hunts. For $10,000, hunters purportedly would receive a round trip airfare to Las Vegas, the opportunity to hunt a naked girl and try to shoot her with a paintball gun. They would also receive a video of the hunt, and a computer-created image of the girl's head and upper torso, mounted trophy-like on a wall plaque.

On July 10, LuAnne Sorrel, a reporter for Las Vegas's KLAS TV, accepted an invitation to see a hunt. Sorrel reported what she had seen as genuine on KLAS news. Within a few days, the national media picked up the story. Both Fox News and MSNBC did features on July 16. These big news channels might have been expected to do more rigorous background checks than a small regional station, but in their first reports neither Fox nor MSNBC seriously questioned the factuality of Hunting For Bambi's offer.

The early MSNBC and Fox News stories focused on Hunting For Bambi as an insult to women. "Women's groups and legal experts are, not surprisingly, up in arms over the cruel game", announced Fox News. Rita Haley, president of the New York branch of NOW, was interviewed and said the site's offer was, "appalling and frightening. It says something about the men who want to play this game and something about the financial climate that drives women to want to participate. The big fear is that somebody who plays will eventually want to use real bullets". This would have been reasonable commentary if the site had been genuine. But for TV news to solicit comments on a hoax, only discredits the commentators by making them, in hindsight, appear to be gullible over-reactors.

MSNBC further elaborated this media-fabricated controversy by staging a satellite debate between one of the Bambi women and a NOW representative on the question of whether the site was indeed a potential threat to women. The Bambi employee smiled imperturbably as she was warned about the danger of blurring fantasy and reality in the minds of violence-prone males. She claimed to see no connection between Hunting For Bambi and real world violence towards women. "It's just fun", she said. She also pointed out the irony that if Hunting For Bambi had been selling sex with the Bambi women, no one would have objected, since prostitution is legal in Nevada

Since the '80s, when the anti-porn movement undermined its own credibility by making exaggerated claims that all pornography promotes sexual violence, it has become increasingly unfashionable to criticize or oppose pornography. Even opposition to material that frankly depicts violence towards women has diminished almost to non-existence in an Internet culture where the most extreme material from "authentic rape" videos to hardcore sadomasochism, are readily available.

If Fox News and MSNBC were interested in reviving this cause, they could have chosen from hundreds of well-established Web sites, rather than featuring an obscure, fly-by-night hoax like Hunting For Bambi. The pseudo-feminist debates Fox News and MSNBC staged on the topic were ultimately a smokescreen for their own exploitation of Hunting For Bambi for ratings. The debates were never intended as serious explorations of a real issue. They were media fabricated conflicts between stereotypes — the angry feminist and the hard-candy hooker — gladiatorial cat fights staged around a fake context for entertainment value.

The real question is whether Fox News and MSNBC were victims of a hoax, or conscious participants who helped spread the hoax to a mass audience than it would otherwise never have reached. There can be no doubt that Hunting For Bambi was originally designed to exploit male feelings of aggression towards women. Michael Burdick described his target audience as "the wimp of America", for whom Hunting For Bambi provided, "a chance to come out and vent his aggression and really take charge and have some fun". That Burdick's site was originally intended for a small, minority audience is also apparent in the crude, misogynist wording of the site's original front page. Before July 16, when the first Fox News and MSNBC stories aired, the front page of Hunting For Bambi contained this introduction:

"If you would like to fly out to wonderful fun filled Vegas for the hunt of a lifetime now is your chance. You can actually hunt one of our Bambi sluts and shoot her with paintballs while we film the whole thing and tape it for your own home video. We will send you a complete list of wall hangers to choose from once your reservation is confirmed for your hunt. With over thirty women ready to be chased down and shot like dogs we guarantee a wide variety of Bambi's to choose from. Whether it is a fat ass cow or a perfect 10 we have an abundance of these beauties. So if you are the ultimate sportsman and are seeking the ultimate adrenaline rush then come out to our ranch and shoot one of these nagging whiny bitches where it hurts and shut her the fuck up. Then mount her like a 'Real Man'".

Soon after the first Fox News and MSNBC stories aired, Hunting For Bambi revised its front page to remove the aggressively misogynist language in italics, to:

"If you would like to fly out to wonderful fun filled Vegas for the hunt of a lifetime now is your chance. You can actually hunt one of our Bambi babes and shoot her with paintballs while we film the whole thing and tape it for your own home video. We will send you a complete list of wall hangers to choose from once your reservation is confirmed for your hunt. With over thirty women ready to be chased down and shot like dogs we guarantee a wide variety of Bambi's to choose from. Whether it is the girl next door or a perfect 10 we have an abundance of these beauties. So if you are the ultimate sportsman and are seeking the ultimate adrenaline rush then come out to our ranch and shoot one of these trophies. Then take home the video of her mounted on the wall for all your friends to see."

Hunting For Bambi abruptly cleaned up its image to appeal to a broader audience as it crossed over into mainstream awareness. Inherent in this hasty revision, is a sense of Hunting For Bambi's lack of preparation for their sudden success; a sense of being taken by surprise that undermines the idea of a well planned media hoax. This was not the only modification. In the site's early version, the pictures of the 30 Bambi women, were linked to separate websites, advertising the women's services as prostitutes. When the site received national attention, these links were removed.

In its original form, the Hunting For Bambi website seems to have been a loose collaboration between Burdick's video business and some Las Vegas prostitutes, who appeared in the Hunting For Bambi videos and also used Burdick's site to promote themselves. The hasty removal of the links to the prostitution sites when the site achieved national attention suggests that Burdick was trying to cover up the original site's dual purpose and focus the site entirely on the Hunting For Bambi hunt ad to strengthen the fantasy's credibility. These abrupt changes make it clear that Burdick was no master media manipulator and that Hunting For Bambi was not, in its early form, a particularly well constructed or purposeful attempt to hoax the public. The hoax aspect of the site developed in direct proportion to the attention the site received from the national media.

Fox News and MSNBC reported the Hunting For Bambi story in two stages: first as a scandal, then as a hoax. It might appear from this that Fox News and MSNBC were at first genuinely taken in by Burdick's hoax and that later they helped to expose the hoax. But in their earliest reports, MSNBC and Fox News actually downplayed or suppressed questions about the site's authenticity.

In MSNBC's July 16th report they referred to an article on Snopes.com arguing that Hunting For Bambi might be a hoax on the grounds that the Web site lacked proper contact information. But instead of doing a serious follow up on this possibility, MSNBC simply emailed a spokesman for Hunting For Bambi and simply accepted his assurance that, "the enterprise is real". Fox News gave no indication whatever in their first report that Hunting For Bambi might be a hoax, although the Fox News fact checkers undoubtedly had access to the same skeptical sources as MSNBC. To question the story's authenticity in the early stages would have been to dilute its shock value, and in the debates that Fox News and MSNBC staged on the site's social significance, the story was treated as real and the question of a possible hoax was entirely eliminated from the debate.