A veteran producer for NBC's Dateline has claimed that she was fired by the network after complaining to top NBC News execs that the "To Catch a Predator" series violated not only the news division's ethical principles but standards of responsible journalism in general. Marsha Bartel, who said in a $1-million lawsuit against the network that she had worked for NBC News for 21 years, claimed that after she was appointed as producer of the highly rated series on Internet predators, she quickly realized that she would have little supervision over the operations of the group Perverted Justice, which the show's executives had hired to lure adults to a house, fitted out with hidden TV cameras. The marks, who expected to meet teenagers for sex, instead found themselves confronted by Dateline reporter Chris Hansen, followed by a squad of police officers. Bartel said she complained to her superiors that Perverted Justice refused to provide complete transcripts of the conversations between their teenage-posing decoys and the targets but later learned that they "sometimes beg individuals to come to the sting locations even after the targets of the sting initially decide not to come."
There's more if you can take it. Now as one or two of you know, I'm pretty zero-tolerance when it comes to perverted adults who have sex with children. I guess most people are pretty low-tolerance about that.
But, there's always been something that's bothered me about the "perverts on the internet" scare that we've had over the past few years in general, and this Dateline show in specific. I admit I don't have chapter and verse on this.
But some combination of common sense and gut feeling has always made me think it doesn't happen as much as some seem to want us to believe. And when it does happen more often than not it's entrapment, as it seems to be in this case, if the producer is correct.
But the idea that at most if not all of the networks, "ethical principles [and] standards of responsible journalism" come second to entertainment value is hardly telling most of us anything.
Quite frankly, that's why most of us read the internet and/or watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
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I've always been uncomfortable with the popularity of that show, because it seems less about informing the public or taking an objective look at the phenomenon it covers than it is about encouraging the audience to enjoy watching those miserable bastards squirm. And that's something that does -- I'm not sure what word I want here, perhaps moral or spiritual -- harm to the audience. Some crimes may well deserve public humiliation, but inviting someone to enjoy watching that humiliation is ugly in its own way. Pedophiles are like terrorists: in both cases, there's no denying that there are real individuals who are causing real harm, but they've also become convenient targets when someone wants to whip the public into an unreasoning frenzy. And if you say "wait, maybe we should calm down and not be in an unreasoning frenzy but approach this rationally instead" you're accused of hating America or hating children or being blind to the terrible threat out there.
And on top of that, Avedon Carol points out how some parties profit from that kind of thinking...
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