The recent L.U.T.S. Award winner was NBC's Dateline!
NBC's DateLine had proved itself to be a real garbage tabloid!
On Sunday September 16 DateLine errored (whoops… AIRED!) some of the most disturbing dribble aimed at expanding the definition of Sexual Harassment to include name calling between high school students.
I sent them this email:
SUBJECT: "Sexual Harassment Redefined"
Your program of Sunday evening did a fine job of further blurring the line between "sexual harassment" and name calling. The litigation on behalf of the misfit student that was center staged in this tabloid feature exemplifies one more way that the bloated sum of $5400 per year per student will be misspent.
It is notable that during the entire program there was only one instance of actual "sexual harassment"* named--and it wasn't by the star of the show that is exercising her family's "legal right" to steal from tax payers. It is clear to me that this one instance* was carefully included by your producers to as part of the device to peddle the concept that name calling can be a form of "sexual harassment".
Another method used in this program to confuse was the interleaved use of the word "harassment" by itself with the phrase "sexual harassment"--by hinting as such at an interchangeablility between these terms it helps to open the audience to the idea that name calling is somehow lumped together with unwelcome contact and even facial expressions to a female from a male that have already become a part of the big family of actions that ultimately constitute "sexual harassment" and therefore are subject to litigation.
Further, the "harassment expert" that was interviewed was in addition to having a grating whiny tone, a serious lightweight. Your producer could have at least pretended to be impartial by including some comments from the side of sanity so as not to leave the make believe expert's comments unchallenged.
I suppose the producers figured that inviting the schools representatives to talk somehow satisfied the burden or impartiality. It should be clear that their declining an interview is somewhat natural given their current legal predicament--your hostess' mentioning of this without clarifying this important point was just one more device to mislead the program's audience.
An otherwise superb show. Bravo!
________________
*One case was mentioned where
a male student would place their hand on a female students chair resulting
hand to buttocks contact upon the unsuspecting females sitting down in
class.--The difference between this behavior and all the name calling examples
that accounted for every other example of "harassment" is important,
but naturally no distinction was made on the program.
I urge you to send your thoughts
on this subject to dateline@nbc.com.