I've posted about To Catch a Predator and Dateline before. Most of the slime on that show is from the journalists.

Rolling Stone and Ted Rall seem to follow the same line of thinking.

Depression and rational thought

I was watching the O'Reilly show with BillO commenting on the prosecutor who killed himself inside his house as police and Dateline surrounded his house after a failed sting attempt.

I say it was a failed sting attempt because the guy did not show up to meet what he thought was an underage girl. Dateline had hired Perverted Justice to entice the guy to meet a 13 year old, he agreed to meet her, but turned around and went home.

Police were watching and when they saw the enticement didn't work they took Dateline along to raid his home and arrest him anyway.

They didn't get a chance, the guy killed himself.

The guy's family is sueing. Good for them, I think.

BillO doesn't seem to agree.

It's a sure thing that a guy who commits suicide is not thinking rationally. Maybe BillO is right and the guy was guilty and the suicide was because of his shame from the guilt. Or maybe that guy thought he was part of an X-files episode and he was following the script, thinking the gun was simply a stage prop. But, whatever the guy was thinking, it was not a rational thought. That part is certain.

The idea that depression is about mood and feelings rather than a disorder of thought is what tends to lead idiots like BillO to try to analyze suicide as if the person who killed himself was being rational. That's just not the way depression and suicide works.

If you actually watch those Dateline shows and think that Dateline (or the Police) are actually giving you an honest protrayal of any of it, keep this in mind.

As for the rest of the cases, he said neither police nor NBC could guarantee the chat logs were authentic and complete.

Dateline should go back to blowing up pickup trucks.

Dateline Predators

I kind of wonder what kind of chatrooms Dateline is surfing. The screen name of one of the predators they think they caught is can_I_rape_you-anally.

I'm sorry people, but this doesn't exactly sound like a screen name in a chat room frequented by 13 year olds. Most adult chat rooms would 86 anyone with that screen name.

Predators

In 1993 the NBC newsmagazine Dateline moved from being a newsmagazine to being an early reality TV show. That was when they aired an episode where they rigged an explosion on a GM pickup to "demonstrate" that a design flaw tended to cause gas tank explosions. They forgot to tell the viewers that the explosion they filmed wasn't caused by a collision, it was caused by a bomb they planted on the pickup.

More recently Dateline has teamed up with Perverted Justice for a new reality show called "To Catch a Predator". Like almost all reality shows, it really has very little to do with reality.

Perverted Justice is basically a vigilante group. Some of their tactics are less than noble.

Perverted Justice itself seems to have gotten it's start with the role playing fetish of it's owner. His history of engaging in internet chat using the role of a 13 year old simply for his own enjoyment (long before the Dateline hookup) seems a little to far over the edge of creepy to me.

On the show they give the appearance that the decoy's employed by Dateline and Perverted Justice are just passive in various chatrooms, waiting for some predator to it on them. But according to Stone Phillips of Dateline that's not actually true.In many cases, the decoy is the first to bring up the subject of sex., he says. Just who is the predator here?

At least one of the evil ones captured by Dateline is mentally retarded.

CBS news seems to think Dateline is crossing an ethical boundary

grits for breakfast

Lawsuit about the Dateline show

Update:

One comment an announcement on rgp about this post

> Wow. That's amazing and sickening at the same time. The story about the
> 19 year old and his mom was absolutely unbelievable. Why would Dateline
> associate with these clowns? Are ratings that hard to get?

It makes them judgement proof in a lawsuit, perverted justice is doing all the enticement/entrapment. ?Dateline learned their lesson about direct invovement in manipulating things when they got sued for planting the bomb in the GM pickup and then claiming the explosion was because of a gas tank design defect.