News
By Dan Petty
|
January 29, 2009
From the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, to India's child sex-trade and the counterfeit prescription drug program in China, Dateline NBC correspondent Chris Hansen has gained notoriety and praise for investigating issues largely cloaked from the public's view.
But Hansen is, perhaps, most widely known for his work with "To Catch a Predator" -- Dateline's 12-part investigative series into men who solicit sex from underage girls in Internet chat rooms.
"Take a seat," he often told the men in a clear, firm, authoritative voice when first confronting them in the home on national television.
Each of the some 250 men "To Catch a Predator" has exposed yields different conversations and the possibility of slightly different outcomes, all of which combines for television that is the apotheosis of high-stakes drama.
And that's where critics begin to take issue with the series, which has, for now, gone into an indefinite hibernation.
Dateline's work with law enforcement agencies throughout the country on the show and its decision to pay consulting fees to the organization Perverted Justice -- the online Internet predator watchdog group Dateline partners with -- has raised the ire of critics who charge the show crosses journalism's sacred ethical boundaries.
In 2006, a string operation in Murphy, Texas, drove one man, Kaufman County assistant district attorney Louis Conradt Jr., to shoot and kill himself as police closed in on his house.
