nah pop, no style

I found myself spending last night in bed, reading, drinking Elephant Malt Liquor (I kid you not) and watching 20/20 (I kid you not once more). Any of these activities individually would be worth writing about, but it was 20/20 that set me off — not so much the show itself, which was completely inane, telling the sad stories of former Broadway “Annie” stars losing direction and the inspirational tale of the youngest African-American millionaire, but rather, seeing John Stossel’s face, and contemplating the awful effects these moral panic-driven newsmagazines have on us as viewers.

Since I’m pretty sure I’ve whined about Stossel on here before, I turn to another example, possibly the most important TV newsmagazine feature of today: Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” series. My mom, along with millions more across the land, is a big fan. Last time I was home I was reading Steven Levy’s Newsweek column, which dealt with the show, and poked fun at her citing his sensible analysis, but of course I didn’t get too up in arms because, hey, she’s Mom. But really: is a television series devoted to catching child predators with their pants quite literally down to anyone’s benefit, besides the network cashing in on all the viewers it attracts?

No one likes sexual predation, especially when it’s perpetrated on kids. I’m pretty sure that’s a social norm that would hold up without a nationally televised Candid Camera-type event to reassure everyone. But let’s be honest with ourselves: people who take part in this sort of activity have serious issues that they need to deal with. The way to deal with it isn’t to humiliate them in front of the global village (if you’ll allow me that term).

A couple years ago I led a workshop at the Warhol on the idea of moral panic and the media. It of course is the nature of any “news” outlet fueled by the profit motive to create and sustain a state of panic at any time possible; that’s what turns on TV sets and sells papers and magazines. Think about the shark attack summers of 2003 and 2004, or the more recent “rash” of young white woman abductions/murders/disappearances. When capital is at stake, the spectacle is key, at most any cost.

In the case of “To Catch a Predator:”

• Parents are conditioned to believe the Internet is a real wild west, full of pervs popping out of nowhere, ready to molest. In reality, like Levy points out in the above article, it takes some work to wander into the path of an online predator at this point. The likelihood is doubtful to be any more than running into a sexual predator in real life. If parents can convince their kids to not talk to strangers on the street, they should be able to instill the same sort of caution in them when they’re online. It’s the same effect that media representations of violent crime tend to have: the risk of being injured or killed in the city by violent crime isn’t much greater in most cases than the risk of being injured or killed in one kind of accident or another in the suburbs or rural areas. There’s a moral component to violent crime, though, that calls for more outrage in the voices of reporters, and therefore makes the city seem a great deal scarier.
• We revert back to public humiliation as a form of punishment. Note where it says in the article that public humiliation is generally considered to be cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional. This is different from Scarlet Letter -type nonsense, wherein the entire town knows what you’ve done and won’t forgive you; this is humiliation on a national scale, in our living rooms and bedrooms in prime time. It’s bad for the perpetrators, whose chances for full rehabilitation are surely lessened a great deal by the reality of having been outed to the general citizenry as not only a felon but a deviant. It’s also bad for us as viewers, in that it generally appeals to our basest, most vindictive nature and makes it feel as if that’s a positive thing.
• It glorifies and thus encourages vigilantism, like this, a case in which a couple losers were using the same tactics (finding potential Internet predators by posing as children in chat rooms, arranging to meet up) to find victims for robbery and extortion. I may not be a huge fan of cops, but I’m even less a fan of bounty hunters, and even less a fan of random folks who think they can make the world better by personally stopping do-badders.

If you’re REALLY CONCERNED about sexual predators online, there are much better ways of working to stifle the problem than broadcasting fodder for moral masturbation to the country. Educate kids on watching out for themselves, work on ways for websites to keep young ones from getting involved in creepy talk with creepy folks. I’ll warn you, though, you might not reach Stossel-style celebrity status doing something that actually helps.