The real cultural predators

5-28-2009 National:

Controversy finally canceled Dateline NBC’s popular “To Catch a Predator” series. Although it wasn’t the only program to profit from the sordid world of sexual abuse, it was the first to transform audiences’ strange fascination with sexual crimes into a commodity.

To produce the show, Dateline NBC paid the controversial citizens’ organization Perverted-Justice.com, which recruits volunteers to pose as underage Internet users to lure online predators to pursue sexual liaisons. Dateline producers funded the organization, which then staged confrontations between the predators and reporter Chris Hansen, who grilled them before their arrests.

Although Dateline producers marketed the program as an investigation, which reports the news as it currently exists, they were, in fact, helping to produce the news themselves by spearheading antipredator initiatives alongside Perverted-Justice.

There lies one of the show’s significant moral blemishes: A journalist’s responsibility is to report the news, not create it and then cover it.

NBC News executives have staunchly defended the series. It is true that they were ultimately helping to take harmful sexual predators off the street. Yet no matter how noble the work of these journalists might have been, pursuing this end at the expense of sound practices sets a dangerous journalistic precedent and gives their work a certain dishonesty. Perhaps that’s why, despite the show’s graphic element of realness and the detail in which it explored the obscene world of online solicitation, it still had a manufactured and disingenuous feel.

In strangely voyeuristic fashion, NBC’s hidden cameras captured the utter humiliation of men whose lives were being ruined on national television. The show’s genius, purely from a marketing perspective, was that it managed to combine the veneer of a serious investigative report with the manufactured drama of planned confrontations. It’s this combination of artificiality and realism, of specious journalism and reality show candidness that gave the show its popular formula. That’s why Dateline could re-create the same scenario during a four-year period without ever showing something really new. That and, well, people were willing to watch.

After all, as easy as it is to slam NBC for driving up its profit at the expense of honest, respectable journalism, consumers ultimately bought in. Dateline smartly pilloried one of the most universally abhorred and easily condemnable crimes. It seems scapegoating is a clever marketing strategy.

Such marketing strategies are incredibly cynical though. The underlying assumption is that viewers are so desperate for someone on which to blame society’s ills and perversions that they will faithfully watch a television show that does just that.

The sad reality, of course, is that the strategy worked. And when critics finally created a stir about the ethicality of the show, network execs argued that the ends justified the means. Their implication is that ratings come before principled journalism. Cultivate within viewers a sense of moral outrage, the thinking goes, and the ratings will take care of themselves, no matter how artificial the journalism is.

I’m just sorry there’s not more social outrage to go around. ..News Source.. by Christian Hines | IDS