What’s Your Opinion?
By: Scott Morgan
During the Watergate years, Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court famously scolded CBS News reporter Fred Friendly with the following admonishment: "The trouble with your profession, journalism, is that you are often confused between what you have the right to do, constitutionally, and the right thing to do."
News agencies get pounded from every side, for every reason, for doing what we do. And what we do isn’t always right. Even if it sometimes appears to be.
Recently, the NBC news magazine "Dateline" has developed a clear (and seemingly inexhaustible) fetish for programming related to the search for underage sex. The producers and staff work in conjunction with police departments to lure sexual predators, via online chat rooms, to homes purportedly occupied by a lone, eager underage partner. There, the predators are confronted not only by "Dateline NBC" anchor Chris Hansen, who reads printouts of explicit online conversations between the adult and the supposed child, but are arrested by local police once they leave the house.
While "Dateline NBC" has, occasionally, espoused questionable journalistic integrity, it is a relatively new development in its programming to be so focused on setting up stings specifically designed to target online, adult seekers of underage sexual partners. Lately, the show has been an outlet almost exclusively dedicated to the topic and the trend appears to have no real end in sight.
The sad half of this equation is that there is nothing educational about such programming. It teaches us nothing. It gives us no new information about sexual predation, nor enlightens us to the culture that allows this type of situation to fester. It simply parades tragically misguided adults before a camera crew and broadcasts the lurid details, right down to the mug shots of those who fell into the trap.
These episodes commit an egregious journalistic sin in that they are purported to be for the public good which they, in fairness, probably are yet ultimately are packaged for maximum dramatic effect in the Geraldo Rivera tradition of voyeuristic scandal-mongering and presented with the presumable intention of making us feel simultaneously safer and more ill at ease.
On the other hand, there is the extremely salient point that predators are being taken off the streets. Dangerous men (because judging by NBC’s stings, women are either disinterested in finding juvenile partners or are just too smart to leave a trail of online breadcrumbs for the police to follow) are being stopped before someone gets hurt. For better or worse, tangible results are being attained and potentially perilous situations are being short-circuited before they become news in a much sadder, splashier way.
But should newsmakers be at the fore of criminal justice? Is proactive newsmaking better than reactive news coverage?
Does it matter who exposes potential criminals, so long as crime is being pre-empted?
Are journalists overstepping their responsibilities to the public trust by putting themselves in place of police officers, or are they living up to those responsibilities in the face of ineffectual law enforcement?
And if this newspaper were to follow a similar path, would your viewpoint change?
Newsmakers have the right, constitutionally, to provide this kind of coverage. But is it the right thing to do?
What’s your opinion? We’d like to know.
Submit your opinions or comments to the editor online at www.messengerpress.com, or write Scott Morgan at [email protected]. He can also be reached by mail, c/o The Messenger-Press, P.O. Box 446, Allentown, NJ 08501. Responses to this paper may be reprinted in a future edition and may be edited for content. Please include your name, address and telephone number for confirmation and identification purposes.