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Indignation is the table wine of journalism. It goes with everything, and the cheaper the meal the more of it you swig. NBC hits the indignation hard in its evening news show Dateline, which for the last three years has teamed up with a citizens’ group called Perverted Justice to produce the feature known as “To Catch a Predator.” NBC boasts that Dateline has “exposed over 200 potential child predators in its stings,” and host Chris Hansen, in addition to running a blog that offers an “inside look” at his creep-nabbing, has written a book, To Catch a Predator.
Singling out Hansen, Bartel says he “knowingly and falsely claimed ‘at any given time, 50,000 predators were on the Internet prowling for children’ even though a transcript of a video taped interview with his source, a former FBI agent, contradicted Hansen’s claim.”
