It seems to NewMexiKen that this kind of thing is about what we have come to expect from tabloid news and the general coarsening of American pop culture. But C.W. Nevius thinks Nancy Grace has reached “a new depth of sleaze.”
Nancy Grace was in vintage form on her national talk show on CNN’s Headline News. Her guest was a soft-spoken 21-year-old mother named Melinda Duckett. Police in Florida suspect Duckett had something to do with the disappearance of her 2-year-old son, Trenton, on Aug. 27.
But Grace wasn’t satisfied with suspicion. She wanted to solve the case right there in front of a coast-to-coast television audience.
“Why are you not telling us where you were?” Grace demanded, pounding the table. “Miss Duckett, you are not telling us for a reason. What is the reason?”
As the woman stumbled over her words, trying to come up with answers, a small yellow text box appeared at the bottom of the screen: “SINCE SHOW TAPING,” it read, “BODY OF MELINDA DUCKETT FOUND AT GRANDPARENTS’ HOME.”
That’s right. Grace was interviewing a dead woman. Just hours before the taped interview aired last Friday, Duckett committed suicide at her grandparents’ house.
Given the circumstances, Grace’s grandstanding, badgering interview was bad enough. But the idea that her producers at CNN elected to go ahead and run the interview, even though they knew Duckett had killed herself, has veterans of television news shaking their heads.
Nevius has more.