Do we like Chris Hansen?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long run of child-protection reporting and no harmful words found, held back by a contested show, a dropped bad-check case and some very self-promoting recent behaviour.
Chris Hansen is a Michigan State grad who worked his way up through local TV in Lansing, Tampa and Detroit before joining NBC News in 1993. He covered Columbine, the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, and picked up Emmys along the way, including two for a 2004 report on child sex trafficking in Cambodia.
Then came To Catch a Predator. From 2004 the Dateline segments had him sitting down men who turned up at a house expecting to meet a minor, with the line “Have a seat” becoming a meme. It was huge telly, and critics said it blurred news and entertainment.
On the harm check, the record is thin in a good way. Searches turned up no remarks from him about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or climate, and no pattern of working with people who push harm. His recent output is true crime on his own streaming network, TruBlu, which is a different thing from culture-war grifting, though it does mean he's selling a lot of himself.
The mess in his own backyard was small. In 2019 Hansen was charged with a felony bad-check offence over about $13,000 of promotional merchandise. The case was dropped, his lawyer said he'd repaid it in full, and he called it an oversight. It reads as sloppy business rather than a pattern of mistreating people.
The fresh stoush is over Primetime. Hansen says he didn't see the film, calling it fiction attached to a real name, and he called the A24 team “sneaky and disingenuous”. A24's source says he was only asked to sign a standard NDA. He then bought ads before screenings to flog TruBlu, which is cheeky, and a little Hollywood himself.
So would we support him? Mostly yes. The ethics of his old format are still argued about, and a man who lives off his own brand can be a bit much. But the through-line for decades has been going after people accused of harming kids, and nothing we found says he's hurt anyone we care about.