NBC - EX-DATELINE PRODUCER BLOWS WHISTLE ON "PREDATOR"

A veteran producer for NBC's Dateline has claimed that she was fired by the network after complaining to top NBC News execs that the "To Catch a Predator" series violated not only the news division's ethical principles but standards of responsible journalism in general. Marsha Bartel, who said in a $1-million lawsuit against the network that she had worked for NBC News for 21 years, claimed that after she was appointed as producer of the highly rated series on Internet predators, she quickly realized that she would have little supervision over the operations of the group Perverted Justice, which the show's executives had hired to lure adults to a house, fitted out with hidden TV cameras. The marks, who expected to meet teenagers for sex, instead found themselves confronted by Dateline reporter Chris Hansen, followed by a squad of police officers. Bartel said she complained to her superiors that Perverted Justice refused to provide complete transcripts of the conversations between their teenage-posing decoys and the targets but later learned that they "sometimes beg individuals to come to the sting locations even after the targets of the sting initially decide not to come." She claimed that NBC News executives looked the other way at ethical lapses in its dealings with Perverted Justice "because it was more interested in sensationalizing and dramatizing the Predator series for profit than news reporting." Finally, she criticized the network for its collaboration with law enforcement agencies in the production of the program, thereby allowing itself to become "a material witness" rather than "a newscaster reporting on the news."

30/05/2007