here are few television personalities more insufferably pompous and obnoxious than NBC’s Chris Hansen, who despite having earned several awards in journalism, has now been reduced to impersonating a reporter for the newsmagazine, Dateline. Hansen is the point-man for Dateline’s continuing series “To Catch a Predator,” a sting operation on which the show collaborates with the watchdog group Perverted Justice and law enforcement in numerous jurisdictions across the United States. The hidden camera investigation ensnares pedophile suspects red-handed using a coordinated effort that begins with internet chats between a “decoy” posing as a minor and a suspect and ends with police arresting the suspect. It’s a laudable cause.
Therefore, it’s a shame that Hansen and NBC continuously use Dateline to exploit and sensationalize a newsworthy issue for the purpose of generating Nielsen ratings, while mocking the concept of integrity along the way. Each week Dateline exposes an alarming number of creepy (almost exclusively) men, from all demographics, engaging in inappropriate sexual conversations with a Perverted Justice decoy, who the suspects believe is an underage boy or girl. Suspects unknowingly wander into the trap, a house rigged with hidden cameras, police hiding out in the back yard, an adult actor hired by Dateline (who appears to be underage) and the always overzealous Chris Hansen, who is none too shy about injecting himself into the middle of the lurid story.
What transpires next is an exhaustingly perverse scenario. The actor typically invites suspects into the house for a drink, or something equally arbitrary, engages them in small talk and even sometimes asks the suspects to completely disrobe. Meanwhile, in gleeful voice-overs, Hansen apprises viewers of the suspects’ full names, professions, hometowns, marital status and the number of children they may have. Hansen wreaks destruction on the families of the assailants and does so shamelessly, with the tone and enthusiasm of a stand-up comedian, not a newsman.
