"I'm Smug and Self-Righteous Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC..."

While channel surfing this past week, I caught Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC doing one of his patented "hidden camera" confrontation shows. After taking on pedophiles. con men and identity thefts, Hansen is taking on an assortment of bad guys in Las Vegas, such as pimps. Now I find the crimes of pedophiles, identity thieves, and pimps absolutely detestable, so I wonder why my dislike for Chris Hansen almost equals that for the perpetrators of these crimes when I watch these shows?

Hansen really bust into the scene with his "To Catch a Predator" series, where he partnered with Perverted Justice to lure pedophiles into a home to have sex with an underage child. The "bait" kid asks the enthusiastic pedophile to wait in the kitchen while he/she "gets ready", and then Chris Hansen walks in to confront the pedophile and proceeds to humiliate the guy by interrogating him and often catching him in lies around his intentions, armed with sexually provocative transcripts of past instant message chats. When Hansen has sufficient footage of him making the guy squirm, he lets the guy leave the house where he is taken down by waiting members of the local police force. His other series around identity thieves and Vegas bad guys are more or less variants of the same schtick.

So having established that I'm not a big fan of criminal activity, what is it about Chris Hansen that rubs me the wrong way?

I wonder if it's his smug and self-righteous confrontations, where he seems to enjoy almost too much that he's caught a bad guy sticking his hand in the cookie jar. Maybe it's his bravado which seems false, confronting bad guys with tough talk with the knowledge the local police are monitoring their verbal exchange through the hidden cameras should the perpetrator decide to pull a weapon of come out swinging. Maybe it's the fact that Hansen and "To Catch a Predator" cohorts have already been accused by many of taking shortcuts in judicial due process if they can get the dramatic effect they want.

Maybe it's the reality that as grave as these crimes are, Hansen seems to believe strongly that they are worthy of national public humiliation beyond criminal persecution, with him being the face of justice. He has become the face of righteous indignity, and I wonder should he ever make a terrible mistake to do something scandalous (e.g. cheat on his wife) or commit a crime, would he still feel that his trial and shame should be held in full view of television viewers all over the world? Can Chris Hansen cast the first stone?

Maybe even worse, his purported outrage against these crimes might be totally insincere, and he's simply a hack journalist which has conceived of a notion that people are voyeurs who will boost the ratings of a network when they can see an acceptable form of vigilante justice. Maybe he could care less about these crimes or their victims. He just wants to know that NBC can keep guarantees to their advertisers that they have sufficient share of the 24-49 adult demographic.

Again, I'm not a fan of pedophiles, identity thieves and Sin City criminals. But there's something unclean (although admittedly alluring) about Chris Hansen's work.