Saturday, July 23, 2011

How Nancy Grace Is Killing CNN

Grace is the former Georgia prosecutor who became a television legal commentator, first on Court TV and, more recently, on Turner Broadcasting's HLN cable channel.

She's a snarling, angry presence whose habitual sneer is an epic chasm of contempt.

Her view of the criminal justice system is flawlessly Manichean. There are good people — police officers and prosecutors — and evil people — defendants and their lawyers. Grace appears to have never met someone arrested who she believed should not be charged, nor anyone charged who should not be convicted.

This cartoon version of the criminal courts is justified by a damp-eyed concern for crime victims that a practiced Grace attributes — at the slightest provocation — to the death of her fiance during a robbery.

Her own zealousness as an Atlanta prosecutor was such that the appellate courts three times cited her for failing to meet her ethical responsibilities. In 2005, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that it agreed with a lower-court magistrate that Grace had " 'played fast and loose' with her ethical duties" as a prosecutor.

Precisely the same can be said of her conduct as a television journalist.

Anyone who had occasion to watch her relentless coverage of the recently completed Casey Anthony murder trial witnessed something quite new to the American news media: a mainstream news organization giving one of its commentators a nightly forum from which to campaign for the conviction of a criminal defendant. It was a campaign that continued after Anthony's acquittal with virtually nonstop on-air abuse of the jurors and defense attorneys.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

She is annoying.... so I never watch her.......fixed!

Anonymous said...

I am sick of her and her faux crying! She needs to get a life.....Anthony was found not guilty due to the prosecutors case not being solid, period!

Am I happy about the verdict, not at all, but it is what it is and that is American justice these days.

FKA_Cato said...

Nancy Grace's shtick is Orwell's two-minute hate expanded to an hour.

I imagine that she appeals mostly to less accomplished versions of herself: women who feel that they've been screwed over by life and who need to see somebody, anybody, pay. And if you can indulge your wrath while wearing pancake makeup and a palm-tree hairdo, all the better.

One of the most loathsome people in the media, which is saying something.

Anon said...

You are right Cedar!
I watched the whole trial and HLN nightly coverage. It was sick.
The attorney for the Doctor that is charged with Michael Jackson's death is specifically using Nancy Grace as a reason to sequester the jury in that case.

Great post!