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February 16, 2009

NBC's war criminal hunt meets federal resistance

Hollywood Reporter's Eriq Gardner filed this story about how NBC News' plan to upgrade its "To Catch a Predator" series to hunt war criminals instead of perverts is meeting resistance from federal prosecutors. C'mon news producers, cops don't come to your office and try to show you how to pretend to be underage girls online. As much as your neo-Simon Wiesenthal efforts are doubtless well intentioned, perhaps outing war criminals is best left to those without air-date deadlines and ratings concerns.

NBC News stopped producing episodes of its hit "To Catch a Predator" series without ever really explaining why.

Was the enormous popularity of the show finally sinking into the heads of would-be sex predators? Or perhaps it had something to do with the settlement of a $105 million lawsuit from the family of Bill Conradt, who shot himself in the head as a SWAT team and host Chris Hansen waited outside his house?

NBC now has plans to launch an even bolder version of the series -- targeting war criminals -- indicating that the latter theory seems less likely. Unless the network figures that targeting foreign-born individuals is less legally risky than hunting down sex predators.

The planned show is taking some criticism from government officials. The Department of Homeland Security told the New York Times that "a program of this kind could negatively impact law enforcement's ability to investigate and bring cases against the perpetrators of these horrible crimes."

Maybe they have a point. Earlier in the month, in two separate rulings, courts overturned convictions of men busted by online stings because there was no actual "victim" in the case. The sting operations had nothing to do with NBC, but it's easy to see why some in government might be concerned about media interference in delicate legal proceedings.

NBC's first special is said to target Leopold Munyakazi, a visiting professor of French at Goucher College in Towson, Md., over war crimes conducted in Rwanda.

Munyakazi denies the charges, and the president of Goucher College has gone on the offensive with an open letter questioning "the unusual circumstance in which the prosecutor traveled around the United States with a television producer and camera crew."

(Editing by Dean Goodman at Reuters)

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