This diary is a quick vent about the MSNBC ad we now see at Daily Kos.
Child pornography is a bad thing. People who buy it, sell it, or who generally sexually exploit children should be punished and shunned. Purveyors should be jailed, buyers should be jailed, and networks which exploit the situation for ratings should lose ratings.
MSNBC has made a big deal lately of their Dateline child porn sting "caught on tape" series. I can't say why this series particularly bothers me, but it does.
This is how it works: a reporter from Dateline sets up the sting by working with an internet watchdog group. Adult volunteers at the group pose as teenagers on the internet engaging adults in conversations, sometimes exchanging photos, and arranging meet ups between the adults and the "teen" at a house rented for that purpose.
more after the fold
The adult shows up and is confronted with a reporter and a cameraman videotaping the entire encounter as the reporter righteously and indignantly interviews the moronic and sick adult who arranged a meeting.
Tapes of the meeting are then played on MSNBC over and over again. This segment of the network's newsgathering must be popular -- viewers were treated to a month of prurient replay of the segment with the "caught on tape" rabbi.
These set ups really bother me. As a mother, hell, as a human being, I'm disgusted by people who traffic in child porn. As a lawyer, I'm intellectually interested in the entrapment aspects of the caught on tape series. Mostly, I'm saddened and discomforted by this exposure of human frailty and dysfunction. But frankly, I just turn it off or change the channel when the segment comes on.
But now MSNBC is crossing a line for me. Today on Crooks and Liars, an ad is posted with the picture of a purported teen taking her shirt off and exposing her stomach.
Here's the pic from the ad entitled "teens."
Beneath the ad are the words:
I'm a teenager.
Am I hot?
With links to:
Yes or No
Read More...
If you click on "read more," you're directed to a page about a Dateline story on child porn, "Predators in the Headlines."
Once on the page, the reader can choose from several links, including
* 'To Catch a Predator' III: full story
* 'Predator' III additional footage
* What can be done to stop predators?
* Del the decoy
* Judge denies request to seal predator case (i.e., you can read the details too!)
Most of the stories focus on the caught on tape aspect of the case. And the ad itself, obviously, focuses on the sexual. No picture of a child at the computer or a parent and child working together on the computer. The ad is a picture of an undressing teenager and a "poll." (Don't be surprised if the ad shows up here on Daily Kos!)
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that MSNBC is pandering here. I didn't click on the poll, but I'm assuming it goes to the same page as "read more."
Don't get me wrong, child porn is bad. But how much better is capitalizing on the viewing public's taste for public humiliation and titillation?
I watch MSNBC for Olbermann and like the news show enough to ignore the ads and the caught on tape segments. I don't know, frankly, what the stats are on internet child porn or internet child seduction in this country. What the networks might call "epidemic!!!!" might be, might not be.
But I'd rather watch segments honestly reporting our predator president than be treated to rerun after rerun of some schmuck getting "caught on tape." And I'd rather see Congress holding or failing to hold hearings on, oh, New Orleans, torture in Iraq, White House intelligence manipulation leading up to the war, the continued manipulation of the CIA, than catch congressional photo ops with the teen confessing to taking money for posing nude on MySpace.
Smells like a straw issue to me. Not the kind that is fabricated, simply the kind of story that's easy to do and lucrative to rerun over and over in place of the hard and difficult news reports the American public really needs to see.
Updated to reflect the ads arrival on our shores!