"It would go a little like this. A man would arrive at a house after chatting to someone he believed was underage, with a plan to have sex or engage in a sexual act. The house would be rigged with hidden cameras and the child would be an actor of age, playing the role of an excitable pre- or young teen, maybe even suggesting they both drank alcohol as a further illicit act."
"Between the years of 2004 and 2007, Dateline's To Catch a Predator was a prime-time ratings hit in the US, a cleanly packaged version of something undeniably dirty, a punchy reminder to parents that the ever-expanding online world was not to be trusted. It was a strange mix of schadenfreude and horror, says David Osit, an Emmy-winning documentary film-maker, whose latest film Predators looks back on the show and the controversy surrounding it."
"The victims in To Catch a Predator are far harder to feel sorry for, paedophiles who were willing to do something indefensibly grotesque and impossible to empathise with, but the method of catching them remains deeply uncomfortable, cops working hand-in-hand with a TV crew, and the questions it asks about us and why we would want to play witness, are incredibly troub"
To Catch a Predator ran on Dateline between 2004 and 2007 and became a prime-time ratings hit in the US. The show staged hidden-camera sting operations in which adults who believed they were meeting minors were confronted by television hosts and law enforcement. Producers used adult actors to play children and sometimes suggested illicit acts to provoke suspects. The format combined schadenfreude and horror while raising ethical questions about collaboration between TV crews and police. Documentaries are now revisiting that exploitative television era alongside other shows accused of cruelty, exploring regulatory gaps and the spectacle of public shaming.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]