There's really no sense in my writing yet another angry screed against Nancy Grace; I've written quite a few already -- including an open letter to CNN published in the Huffington Post and circulated far and wide online -- and they've accomplished pretty much nothing other than to stop me from actually resorting to some form of physical violence.
I think with this latest suicide that the most repugnant, irresponsible and dangerous person on television is linked to -- a woman who may have admittedly killed her baby in a drunken accident but who wound up lighting herself on fire only after becoming the nightly target of Grace's entirely self-serving indignant histrionics -- the best I can hope for is that at some point Nancy Grace decides that Nancy Grace herself doesn't deserve to live.
Wouldn't that be a beautiful thing: Nancy Grace devoting hours and hours of airtime, night after night, to hammering away at Nancy Grace; a woman who's now been implicated in two deaths; who regularly flouts any standard of decency, morality and ethical conduct, all in the name of making herself rich; who believes that she has the right to play the role of judge and jury -- and, inadvertently, executioner -- over cases that haven't yet been decided or have already been ruled on fairly and justly, trying them separately or retrying them in the court of public opinion; who claims to speak for the victims but who herself is a bullying victimizer; who subverts the real justice system over and over again using one of the most powerful weapons the world has ever seen: a televised forum. Could Nancy Grace bring Nancy Grace on her show, slap a clever nickname on her like "Vodka Mom" or "Tot Mom" -- "Grudge Judge" maybe? -- and pile onto her, eviscerating her until she feels so guilty for being a reckless, wretched, despicable monster that it would lead Nancy Grace to take her own life? Could Nancy Grace put Nancy Grace on trial publicly -- doling out whatever punishment she and she alone feels is deserved?
That would be something worth watching.
Here now is the last thing I wrote about Grace, published just a few months ago. You can literally replace one or two words and it works perfectly this morning.
"An Open Letter To CNN Regarding Nancy Grace" (Originally Published, 2.14.12)
You have to fire Nancy Grace.
Is that simple and unambiguous enough for you to get through your heads the gravity of the situation that the world's most irresponsible cable news presence has put your network in? Is it finally sinking in just how reckless, unhinged and flat-out dangerous Grace is -- and what an embarrassment she is to the CNN brand I have to assume you value -- now that she's used your airwaves to make the ludicrously inflammatory claim that Whitney Houston may have been murdered, without a shred of actual proof? Did you cringe when one of your level-headed anchors, Don Lemon, was forced to follow up her ridiculous, histrionic accusation with a disclaimer distancing CNN from the opportunistic ravings of one of its own? Are you maybe, now, after all this time, beginning to realize the level of shame that Grace has heaped at your doorstep for the past seven years -- seven years in which you've inexplicably given her free rein to bullhorn whatever wild theories or self-serving but ultimately defamatory blather have popped into her overactive mind?
You can't let this continue. Enough is enough.
I'll say it again: You have got to fire Nancy Grace -- and you have got to do it now.
For reasons most sane people will never quite understand, you let it slide when Grace -- in a near-sociopathic display of morbid prurience and sadistic exploitation -- berated Florida mother Melinda Duckett on-air to the point where it may have led her to kill herself, then ran the pre-taped interview immediately following the suicide. You looked the other way when, after months of indignant torch-and-pitchfork bluster from a CNN host's chair directed toward them, it was revealed that three Duke lacrosse players were in fact innocent of all rape charges against them, a verdict which prompted the perpetually wrong Grace to not only refuse to admit that she was wrong but to sub in another CNN anchor to deliver the news of the court's decision. You abdicated your responsibility to do something to stop the daily onslaught of incendiary invective spewing from the geyser of crap in the middle of Grace's face in the wake of the Casey Anthony verdict. Whether Casey Anthony is truly guilty or innocent doesn't matter one bit -- a court spoke and justice as we know it in this country was served. But that didn't matter to Nancy Grace, because in her mind she is the only real arbiter of right, wrong and legality and therefore it's within her God-given right to sit in judgment of each and every court case she calculatingly milks of every last drop of soap-opera tawdriness in the name of keeping herself relevant.
And that's just scratching the surface of her vulgarity.
She can do this kind of thing all she wants. This is a free country. But she should not be allowed to do it as a representative of CNN.
You have to fire Nancy Grace and you have to do it now -- before she does any more damage to your already tarnished reputation. You simply cannot continue to provide her with an on-air forum at your network and simultaneously claim to be a responsible news organization, one which holds itself to a high journalistic standard. The two just don't go together -- they can't.
She's already a national laughingstock, but you don't have to be by association. Not anymore.
Get rid of her.
Because I guarantee that her outrageous and irresponsible rants about the life and death of Whitney Houston -- informed only by her megalomania and the apparent voices in her pea brain -- are only going to continue. They're only going to get worse, in fact. And they're only going to bring more shame to CNN.
You have to do it. She's left you no choice.
Related: The Daily Banter: The Despicable Nancy Grace/7.11.12
No comments:
Post a Comment