DATELINE… We Have a Problem

While watching a little television this past Sunday evening, I happened to catch DATELINE, the NBC news magazine program. It was the show’s unsavory topic that caught my attention: “Internet Predators” – the guys that chat with young children on the Internet in the hopes of luring them to have illicit sex – pedophilia, in other words.

What caught my attention was that the show apparently had “gone undercover” to catch these sick individuals by posing as 13 year-old kids online, and then inviting the men to a house where hidden cameras would be rolling. You would not have believed the kind of men they caught in their web, one of the guys caught was a rabbi, for God’s sake.

Now, I am the father of a ten year-old daughter who’s very active on the Internet, so I’m as concerned about these types of predators, I would think, as much as anybody. DATELINE staffers went online and started chatting with men, who BELIEVED they were chatting with a 13 year-old. Then they invited the men to a house they had rented – the presumption was that if they showed up at the house, they had done so in an attempt to engage in sexual activities with a minor.

The show was nothing short of astonishing. They told one guy to show up naked and he did. The show’s host had to throw him a towel. When the rabbi learned that he had been filmed, he went to pieces, almost unable to stand and clearly scared to death. According to the show, he resigned his position the next day.

I won’t go into detail about each Internet predator they caught on their hidden camera, but suffice it to say that they caught quite a few and it was shocking, disgusting, scary, and certainly important to see what is apparently going on every single day online.

As I was watching the program, I started to wonder about a few things. First, I started thinking about whether these guys were going to be arrested as a result of being caught by DATELINE. Then I started wondering how DATELINE could legally do what it was they were doing. I mean, didn’t people have to be told they were going to appear on DATELINE… didn’t they have to sign some sort of legal release in order to be filmed for broadcast television?

The Internet Predators shown on DATELINE, most certainly did not appear to have signed releases – they were caught red-handed chatting about sex with a minor and then caught on camera coming over to the supposed child’s home – and they were freaking out, trying to deny the charges, saying that it was the first time they had done something like this; some simply ran when they saw adults at the house where they had been told the 13 year-old would be home alone.

So how, I wondered, did DATELINE do it? I tried contacting the show via E-mail, but all I received was an auto-reply response thanking me for watching DATELINE, and telling me how to buy transcripts of the show… (Thanks a lot, by the way). Then I tried looking up laws related to filming people for broadcast television. I even checked the ACLU Website to see if they had anything to say on the topic.

Now, I want to be very clear here… I support what DATELINE did in an effort to bring to light what Internet Predators are all about. The people that prey on children are beyond depraved and need to be imprisoned, medicated, or otherwise “helped”. My first thought was that if you have to trap them on hidden camera, so be it, as far as I’m concerned. In my mind, if you’re preying on children for sex, you simply don’t have any “rights” and that’s that.

The more I thought about it, however, the more it bothered me. I mean, if DATELINE can hide cameras and create stories in this way, what’s stopping them and others in the media from using the methodology for other purposes. For example, what if a religious program wanted to “catch” people going into a gay bar and then having illicit sex in the bar’s parking lot. Or, what if they were “catching” people doing other things, like buying loose joints on the streets of Manhattan.

Imagine the following scenario: A guys in a bar having a few drinks. He leaves the bar, walks down the street, and is approached by what appears to be a woman. She offers him sex for money and he accepts. The go off to his car to engage in the act, she turns out to be a transvestite, and the whole thing is captured on hidden camera and broadcast on television. The show’s title might be: Transvestite Prostitutes Lure Husbands to Cheat, or some such thing.

Now, the guy leaving the bar has certainly committed a crime by soliciting what he thought was a woman for sex. If caught by the police, he would likely be arrested and punished under the law. Perhaps he’d pay a fine, or maybe even spend a day or two in jail. But in this example, he wasn’t caught by the police, he was “caught on hidden camera” by DATELINE, for example, and his punishment is to be nationally shamed.

I don’t remember hearing about “national shaming” as a punishment in the U.S. and I’m thinking that such a punishment could be interpreted as being “cruel and unusual”. Again, as a father of a ten year-old, I’m not completely opposed to such cruel and unusual punishment for those that prey on children, but as an American citizen, I’m concerned. I mean, if a person gets caught doing something illegal, say smoking marijuana, or even stealing something from a store, they should be punished under the law, but that doesn’t mean that they should be punished by DATELINE.

Also, keep in mind that we are all still presumed to be innocent prior to being found guilty. And DATELINE is not the body charged with determining a person’s guilt. What if they filmed someone who, for whatever reason, turned out to be not guilty?

Here’s an example: What if one of the men they filmed coming to the house was not the person that had been chatting online, but the father or other relative of the person chatting. What if he saw what his son or other relative was doing and came over to the house to stop what was going on. DATELINE, after all, was pretending to be a 13 year-old boy; what if the father was coming over to the house to talk to the child’s parents about what he had discovered going on online? He walked up to the door, saw several adults standing around, and ran off in fear of whatever he perceived might be going on. We simply do not know. Several men on the DATELINE program did in fact come to the door of the hidden camera house, see people standing inside and take off. If one of them wasn’t a predator, he’s certainly seen as being one now by anyone that saw his face on the show. It’s not like DATELINE checked their ID or anything. One of those guys could have been a Kirby Vacuum salesman, for all we, or DATELINE know.

The Legal Issues…

I finally did find a Website that presented legal issues surrounding the use of hidden cameras and broadcasting, and what I found made me feel even worse. First of all, I went to DATELINE’s site to see what they had to say for themselves (www.msnbc.msn.com). Sure enough, they had a special page devoted to the subject of hidden camera usage as related to newsgathering and investigative journalism.

Basically, they said it was admittedly controversial, but that their lawyers had approved of their actions, and they “promised” to always use such tactics responsibly. Gee… now doesn’t that make one feel all warm and fuzzy safe? A promise by DATELINE, or any other broadcaster or cable television outlet for that matter, to act responsibly is about as comforting as a presidential candidate promising not to raise taxes in a campaign speech.

Thanks DATELINE, and I’m sure you’re all very nice responsible guys. But let’s not forget that you’re the same people that chose the topic of Internet Predators over all others, and you did so because of its likelihood to result in higher ratings. You cannot be trusted by the American people to “do the right thing” because you are anything but impartial or objective. You’re in it for the money, plain and simple. Oh, I’m sure that you also want to do good, if faced with the choice of good vs. bad, but few decisions are that black and white, and you’ll generally choose the more profitable path.

The amazing thing about Dateline’s position is that, according to the laws on the subject of hidden camera tactics, they’re A-OK. The law basically says that hidden camera footage is OK if the people taping believe that the issue is important to society, or some such vague and ambiguous bullshit.

Of course, what one person believes is important is quite different than what someone else believes, so even after doing more legal research than I could normally stomach, I came to understand… well, not much actually.

The morale of the story is that you better be careful out there because you could be on a not-so-funny version of candid camera at any moment. And if you are “caught” doing something illegal, punishment by the court system may be the least of your worries.