Diane Sawyer's Long-Awaited Prostitution Special Finally Gets Green Light

New York Daily News:

At least one good thing has come out of Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace: Diane Sawyer will finally get to air her hooker special!

Almost two years ago, Sawyer and producers at "Prime Time Live" set out to do a story on prostitution. Wanting to examine Nevada's legal brothels, she headed out to the famous Moonlite Bunny Ranch.

"She really hit it off with all my girls," Bunny Ranch head Dennis Hof tells us. "We even gave her one of the terry-cloth bathrobes they wear. We had it embroidered, "Diane: Trainee."

Sawyer did her best to keep her probe undercover -- even though Carson City locals recognized the towering blond anchorwoman and her husband, director Mike Nichols.

But she found that her prudish rivals posed a bigger problem. Some claimed the piece was disgraceful -- shameless pandering by the news division for ratings.

Read the whole story: New York Daily News

Comments

[HDR]

04:55 PM on 03/18/2008

Are the cameras gonna keep rolling when one of the pimps or madams go off on one of the girls like the stepdad did in one of Diane's more recent in depth reports?

[arindt]

11:26 AM on 03/18/2008

Ok, here's what I don't understand. What does Mike Nichols have to do with this story? Is he gathering material for Working Girl: The Sequel? Is he directing Diane's Primetime specials now? On second thought, that could actually be interesting...

[StephenSmoliar]

11:10 AM on 03/17/2008

The BBC had the right idea. Shortly before the Nevada primary, they dispatched one of their (female) reporters to a major Las Vegas brothel (whose name I forget). The idea was that the "working girls" would be able to speculate on the outcome of the primary on the basis of their unique "social networking" position. As far as I am concerned, it was as good a forecasting method as any; and the story was reported just like any other on the BBC, with only the slightest whiff of good humor. Since this story had a point to make beyond just bringing cameras into a brothel, I felt it had more value than either HBO's "reality" programming or ABC's "reality" programming, which is worse for masquerading as investigating reporting!

So what's next? Ashley Alexandra Dupré is now a millionaire. Will CNBC invite her to discuss her investment portfolio?

[Durango]

10:42 AM on 03/17/2008

A Media whore reporting on real whores.

I have much more respect for the working girls.

[VOTER]

12:40 AM on 03/18/2008

Very pointed and well said. Bravo!

[sparkey]

09:27 AM on 03/17/2008

All I can say is "It's about damn time". What was the network doing, waiting till some high profile government official got caught in a prostitution scandal? I mean, it's not like they were waiting to get higher ratings, was it?

[primordialsoup]

08:42 AM on 03/17/2008

Pandering? Perhaps, but prostitution is a fact of life. It's never going away.

[mythster]

09:48 AM on 03/17/2008

So, what's the point of this report?

Why do we really need to know what kind of bathrobes the hookers wear in L.V.? As far as I'm concerned, it's just another incidence of blatant sensationalism on the part of the scandal mongering media or maybe it's a chance to show our young women, already conditioned by the performances of Spears, Hilton, Lohan & Co., how to gain fun and profit from the exploitation of their own bodies.

[mediamarv]

12:34 PM on 03/17/2008

So, is Dianne a prostitute or not??
Not clear from the story...