by Arthur Weinreb
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Saturday evening, CTV aired a segment on its W-FIVE program that dealt with online predators. The network hired criminology students and had them trained by an expert to pose as 12 and 13-year-olds on the Internet. If an adult online expressed the desire to meet them for a sexual purpose, they would be given an address of a house that CTV had rented. When the predator (there were six altogether) showed up, he would be met at the door by a "girl" dressed in a bathrobe and with a towel over her head to hide her age. She would let him in and then leave to get dressed. Then the show's host, Alan Freyer would walk in and talk to the men until they decided that it would be in their best interest to make a hasty retreat from the situation. All of this was of course being filmed.
This W-FIVE segment was hardly what you would call original programming. It was modeled after NBC's Dateline that has been running segments of men showing up to have sex with underage children for some time.
But the CTV episode differed from its American counterpart in one important aspect. In the U.S., police forces cooperate with the program and when the predator flees the house, he is promptly taken down and arrested. In Canada, major police services refused to cooperate with the sting. Toronto's Deputy Police Chief wrote to CTV and said that the network's employees could be possibly breaking the law and cited the sections of the Criminal Code dealing with counselling a person to commit an offence and possessing or making child pornography.
Assuming that no laws are broken, CTV is free to do the segment; they don't need the permission of the police to produce their programming. There is even a good argument that the police were wrong and should have cooperated once the network became determined to do what they did. Had the police been involved, the men could have all been arrested as soon as they left the house and there would be a much greater chance of a successful prosecution of those who tried to engage in a sexual relationship with a child. But what was really troubling about the W-FIVE piece was the network's rationalization for why they were producing and airing it.
In case you haven't already guessed, CTV News president Robert Hurst said that the program was "good public service journalism". What a bunch of hooey. It was nothing more than an attempt to get good ratings and there was nothing public service about it. People know that there are men (and undoubtedly some women) who go onto the Internet for the purpose of luring underage children into having sex. They don't actually have to see the men being interviewed to know this. People who have never seen a bank being robbed or have ever seen a robber being interviewed still know that bank robberies occur. It makes you wonder what CTV will do next. Perhaps they could go into a bar and buy drinks for everyone and then film patrons as they drive away and get stopped by the police. It would be extremely good television to watch a drunk in a stupor say "But officer, I only had two". It would be entertaining TV in the same way that it was entertaining to watch the perverts squirm as they were confronted by Freyer. But there was no higher purpose, journalistically or otherwise.
The program could have been done without the sting carried out and would have been just as informative. The most enlightening portion of the program was not seeing the men sitting in the house with stunned looks but the interview with a 20-something woman who talked about her experience of being lured when she was in her teens.
It was all done for ratings and CTV should at least be honest enough to acknowledge that fact.
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