I generally shy away from criticizing television journalism; there is a traceable amount of elitism to most of these arguments, explicated with an air of superiority by journalists who work in print media. But sometimes criticism is warranted, and this is the case with Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series, in which nascent pedophiles are ensnared by host Chris Hanson, with the help of the online vigilante Web site Perverted-Justice.
A February 1 Associated Press article about the continuing Dateline series calls it “impact journalism.” I beg to differ.
It’s a crime against journalism. It makes fascinating television, in a cringe-inducing sort of way, but it manufactures events artificially. More disturbingly, it sets a negative journalistic precedent for all of NBC news, as Dateline’s producers, along with host Chris Hanson, have become agents of law enforcement.
It is one thing if a story results in an arrest – investigative journalism is a time-honored tradition. It is something else entirely when journalists act on behalf of law enforcement, for the purpose of reporting or filming the resulting arrest.
Dateline claims that the series acts as a deterrent to pedophiles. Does it? This is unquantifiable, primarily because the quasi-muckrakers at NBC news and the pugilistic pedophile entrappers at Perverted-Justice are not in the business of recording actual events as they occurred; they are in the business of creating events. Anyone who has watched “To Catch a Predator” or visited Perverted-Justice online already knows that these highly stylized entrapments are for entertainment value.
And that is a shame, because the vast majority of child molesters don’t find their victims online.
According to the FBI, more than one in five minors are propositioned online by adults. However, according to the Department of Justice, in more than 90 percent of actual child molestation cases, the offender knew the victim personally. The offender might have been a neighbor, a teacher or a family member.
In short: Children are wary of strangers, trusting of associates. This doesn’t bode well for online pedophiles, unless they happen upon a pliable and willing participant. In most cases, however, this is an elaborate ruse perpetrated by Perverted-Justice.
The Perverted-Justice administrators, however, like to state that they helped locate a 14-year-old girl who had run off with a 47-year-old man. They used Yahoo! instant messages and an IP address to track down her kidnapper. Of course, this sort of investigation could have been conducted by anyone with a functional understanding of computers – except for the police apparently, who claimed to have little understanding of such foreign concepts as IP addresses.
The site also claims to have put more than one hundred would-be molesters in jail. But underneath its supposedly good intentions lurks an organization more content with harassing and humiliating people than seeking “justice.”
Perverted-Justice was started by Xavier Von Erck, “a 27-year-old community college dropout from Portland,” as Radar Magazine describes him. According to Radar, Von Erck, who has amassed a number of detractors, once attempted to publicly humiliate an enemy by pretending to be a grown woman, seducing the man with racy online chats, and then finally acquiring a video of the man supposedly masturbating. Von Erck then threatened to release the video on his Web site (he did post the text of the chats and pictures of the man, along with a statement warning other detractors, “This can happen to you.)
Although the man whom Von Erck sought to destroy was supposedly unhinged (though not a pedophile), it also takes an unhinged personality to mastermind a months-long web of deceit – culminating in Von Erck, under the guise of a woman named “Holly,” cold-heartedly convincing his enemy to leave his wife and rent an apartment for the two of them.
On Von Erck’s blog, also reported in Radar, he wrote missives boastfully declaring Nicholas Berg and Kim Sun-Il – both captured and beheaded by insurgents in Iraq – cowards for their meekness in videotaped death. Von Erck doesn’t like detractors, and he loathes the media (except for Dateline), so after the critical Radar article came out he deleted his blog and all of its posts.
The tactics used by Perverted-Justice have come under fire from some law enforcers, too. “I think it’s a huge mistake when law enforcement partners with citizens to do investigations,” said Brad Russ, director of training for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force program, in the Dallas Morning News. “I’m very concerned about entrapment issues.”
Indeed, and it is much worse when the media gets involved.
As an audience, we must ask ourselves: Is this article or broadcast credibly reporting a trend or event, or is it postulating a manipulative construct for entertainment value?
Journalists should report the news, not make it. They should also be careful of the company they keep, especially if they want the public to deem them credible in the future.
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