Gyroscopic Investing

Maybe he can start a new show and call it "To Catch a Hypocrite."  He could come up with a new scheme each week to entrap himself and the police could gang tackle him at the end of each episode and then tell him what a bad person he is.

http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2013/ ... ll-affair/

I never liked the way he ruined people's lives for entertainment by setting them up in what always looked to me like textbook entrapment situations (with "victims" that didn't even exist), but I like him even less now.

Not a fan of reality soft porn or criminal voyeurism. That said I will play devil's advocate here and make a couple points in defense of Mr. Hansen

* There were strict legal standards that had to be met in order to effect an arrest. The suspect had to initiate contact with someone he believed to be a minor and had to start the dirty talk. Also the suspect had to propose the meeting. The decoys pretty much could not do anything more than appear in a chat room and announce their gender and age. More than that raises questions of entrapment.
* Most of the decoys were presented as 13 years of age or younger. So we are not talking about high school kids. I'm not a fan of the 18 yo age of consent laws, but I'm sorry. If your trying to boink anyone under the age of 14, then yes, you are sick and probably a menace.
* The show was not allowed to air segments showing anyone that had not passed legal scrutiny to the effect that there was no danger of their being wrongfully accused etc.

But no I really found the whole show intensely distasteful and if it's being axed, then that is rare good news for TV. I also have really mixed feelings about sexual offender registries that are open to the public. It's like branding people. On the other hand child sex predators (yes there is such a thing) have one of the highest rates of recidivism out there. And if one of them ever laid a finger on any child of mine, it's very unlikely he would be the one going to prison.

I don't have a problem with moving those people through the criminal justice system.  There are laws designed specifically to deal with this type of activity.

The problem I have is turning the legal process into a spectacle designed purely for entertainment with the goal of inflicting even more harm on people who are already in a lot of trouble.

I also have a problem with a self-righteous person hosting the show who is engaging in inappropriate behavior in his own private life.

The whole thing just seems very tacky to me, but then again almost everything on TV is tacky these days.

What is bizarre about these quasi-investigative journalism shows is that there is a HUGE amount of real substantive stuff to be covered that could also be very entertaining, but most of this stuff never gets covered.

I like the work that Bill Whittle does.  He seems to come up with interesting angles on stories that the media never comes close to covering.  He is in some ways a standard conservative talking head, but he's much sharper and funnier than most of that crowd.  Below is a 8:28 clip where he talks about truth.

http://youtu.be/0S7Vw7Wfu5g

I have watched many of his clips, and they are always entertaining.

MT, I mostly agree with what you wrote. I think Hansen did a public service with his first show on this subject. Most people including law enforcement were utterly clueless about how pervasive the problem is and how these persons go about their vile business. He exposed a lot of that, and I remember how shocked people were, including me. He caused quite an uproar and made the cops and prosecutors sit up and deal with a serious problem. For that much I thank him.

But after the first show or maybe the second, it was just entertainment of the most disgusting kind.

If the perpetrators caught by Hansen had the option to be shown on TV in exchange for a reduced sentence, I would have had less problem with the show.  But I never heard of anyone being shown with their explicit approval.