Los Angeles- The director of research for the American Family Association says the recent addition of a pornography reporter to the staff at the Los Angeles Times shows how mainstream pornography has become. Last spring, Ralph Frammolino began regularly covering the pornography industry for the newspaper. He says the porn trade is too big an economic engine to be ignored.

According to Frammolino, the addition of the multi-billion-dollar porn trade as a news topic is thanks to the LA Times’ new editor-in-chief, John Carroll. Frammolino says since Carroll came on board, the Times has “vamped up” its entertainment coverage; and since so-called “adult entertainment” is big business — and legal — the paper is “going to cover it that way.”

But according to Ed Vitagliano of the American Family Association, the decision to put a reporter on the porn beat is not a surprising move from the liberal Los Angeles paper but is simply a sign of an overly sexualized contemporary culture.

“It would be the obvious next step,” he says, “especially in a state like California, which is known for being culturally as blue a state as you can find, for pornography just to be considered another part of the entertainment menu.”

However, because of the Times’ new spotlight on “adult entertainment,” the AFA spokesman points out, parents who get the paper must now be concerned about what their children may encounter as they flip through its pages. “Kids looking through those kinds of sections of the paper for the normal, run-of-the-mill entertainment that they’re used to are now going to find some highly sexualized surprises,” he notes.

Vitagliano says he is not sure whether the LA Times is really trying to be topically relevant or whether the publication is just catering to an industry with a lot of money so it can garner revenue. Either way, he asserts, the daily paper’s regular coverage of porn industry news is still going to normalize pornography in some people’s minds, and its fallout will ultimately harm marriages and families.