Awhile back, this post noted the sad case of Louis Conradt, Jr, the Terrell, Texas prosecutor who killed himself late last year as the police were knocking on his door to arrest him. Conradt’s arrest was a part of a sting operation set up by Perverted Justice, the group that NBC Dateline has adopted as a highly profitable vehicle for generating mass anxiety about child sexual offenders. A Dateline NBC camera crew was outside Conradt’s house when he killed himself.
As this recent Allen Salkin/NY Times article notes, this arrangement has been mutually profitable for Perverted Justice and NBC. Perverted Justice receives $70,000 for every hour of Dateline content, while Dateline uses the 9 million or so viewers per pedophile episode to generate more ad revenue (Dateline nets only 7 million viewers for non-Pedo Dateline episodes). Inasmuch as business is good, Dateline already has six more Pedo-Dateline episodes in the pipeline for 2007.
In this insightful post, Dan Filler over at Concurring Opinions wonders about the efficacy of the Dateline-Perverted Justice venture and where it is leading us:
I leave to the Times article, and the various policy advocates, a discussion of the utility of this joint project. Will it reduce internet child abuse? Hard to know. Will it cause innocent people to suffer? Unclear. But it is time that we come to understand that the trade in fetishized fetishes is if nothing else weird and discomforting. And perhaps – just perhaps – it twists our own culture in exactly the direction we most abhor.
