The Aids Healthcare Foundation held a press conference this morning and AVN sent its chief pit bull Mark Kernes to report on it.

Mark Kernes is what you get when you make a porn fan a porn reporter. What his eye does not see [and that’s usually all the time because Kernes is not a practiced journalist], his unflappable bias supplies the details.

The only problem on this occasion is that there were too many witnesses. So Kernes was left with having to report some semblance of the truth. When Rod Daily or Cameron Bay made remarks unflattering about how Free Speech and the porn industry does business [Daily basically called it a money grab], Kernes had no choice but to bite the bullet.

Instead of attacking Bay and Daily outright since that would have been bad form and Daily would probably break his fat, ugly face, Kernes waited in the bushes to issue this snotty riposte: “[Daily] was of the mistaken belief that CET, one of the industry’s primary testing facilities, is owned by Free Speech Coalition.”

No, Kernes, Manwin owns Cutting Edge and Free Speech and they own you [AVN], so, technically, Daily was off by a hair but pretty much in the ballpark on corruption allegations.

Where I think Daily could make a refreshing spokesman for the change that’s desperately needed in the business is this comment, “If anything, I know for a fact that condoms do work and if anything, I was a guinea pig for that myself, and I know that 100 percent condoms—condoms work.”

I guess Kernes and his buddy Nina Hartley, a condom turncoat, are chewing their knuckles on that one.

It was for Derrick Burts that Kernes reserved the his “out” pitch, the snide ball.

After Burts called porn moratoriums a joke [in light of the fact that Steve Hirsch and John Stagliano operate by a different set of rules as we’ve seen], what does Kernes do? He refers to Burts’ “alleged” mistreatment by porn.

Alleged? Porn outright threw Burts under the bus then tarred and feathered him. There’s no alleged. And Kernes has to throw this in, “There is no evidence that Burts, a gay and straight performer, was infected on an adult movie set.” Haven’t we heard that one before.

Seeing how the industry fucks up syphilis and HIV testing on a regular basis, particularly in the case of Patrick Stone, performer #5, I wouldn’t be too quick to jump to that conclusion. And in Stones’ case, I loved it when Kernes wrote, “Also present were AHF regulars Derrick Burts and Darren James, as well as another apparently gay performer, Patrick Stone…”

That’s like being apparently pregnant and one of the reasons why Kernes needs to be reined in by the editorial staff over there but isn’t. Then, again, maybe Kernes was painting a snide limp-wristed stereotype of gays, in general, which wouldn’t surprise me because I wrote a piece years ago about him being a racist calling him Ku Klux Kernes.

In introducing Stone, Michael Weinstein claimed that Stone was a “fifth” performer who had tested positive for HIV, “but it turned out that he was false positive.”

“As he will tell you, he wasn’t asked to do a follow-up test, and so now they were denying that there were any more cases, [but] they knew that there was a fifth case,” Weinstein claimed.

What does Kernes say to that? “Apparently Weinstein is unaware that Free Speech Coalition does not track the HIV status of gay performers, since such performers generally do not test at industry-approved testing facilities.”

Maybe that system has to change what with all this new-found crossover, HIV, syphilis and hepatitis floating around, and you just acknowledged it, Kernesie. The system is WRONG.

But details like that don’t matter to Kernes who is the Mark Furhman of reporting. When he doesn’t like what he sees, Kernes alters the crime scene. [Like that Japanese super gonorrhea story he brushed off a few months ago.]

To make his alibi fit, Kernes just moves the body to a more convenient location. He wipes the prints off the gun handle, wraps another suspect’s thumbs around it and leaves the convenient glove that doesn’t fit.

And this is no new wrinkle in the Kernes repertoire. He’s been doing it for years, and I would know since I was his boss at one time. But since we were all on the same team, it was, okay, Mark, you screwed up some details on that Marc Wallice HIV story, what the hey.

Kernes both exasperates and delights. Socially, he’s your proverbial bull in the china shop. I’d see him insult talent with thoughtless remarks beyond belief and write flattering reviews because he was buds with the director or maybe if Ray Pistol got him laid. [There’s a whole other story involving that.]

But, at today’s press event, Kernes didn’t have much of a choice but to report the facts as they lay on the table. Which must have been a bitch for him.