2008 Woodie Awards
Did Nancy Grace go too far?
Caitlin Flynn
Issue date: 9/21/06 Section: Opinions
When Nancy Grace first became a media figure, she was respectable and even admirable. The former prosecutor, who has successfully prosecuted over one hundred felony cases, was a frequent guest on talk shows such as "Larry King Live" during intense media coverage of cases including the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping and the Laci Peterson murder case. Although Grace was always firmly entrenched on the prosecution side of every crime that was being discussed, she came across as informed and passionate. Her passion came from a very personal place: when Grace was in college, her fiancé was murdered. After this tragedy, Grace abandoned her goal of becoming an English professor and chose to go to law school instead. After ten years as a prosecutor in inner city Atlanta, Grace became an anchor on Court TV and a talking head in the media. In 2005 Grace reached a new level of fame when she got her own self-titled talk show on CNN's Headline News channel. She also reached a new level of insanity.
Grace's nightly crime-themed talk show quickly became popular among news viewers, and she is now a relatively famous face. Grace's habits of interrupting her guests, slamming defense attorneys (she even went so far as to compare them to guards at Auschwitz) and holding a "guilty until proven innocent" viewpoint on nearly every case have become her trademarks. Grace favors cases where the victims are attractive white females. Last summer she devoted countless episodes to covering the Natalee Holloway disappearance in Aruba; she continued covering the case long after there was any real news to report. Grace often seems to delight in condemning potential suspects before they have even so much as been named suspects by investigators. The whole time she constantly reminds us that she is a crime victim herself, implying that her fiancé's death justifies her increasingly inappropriate on-air demeanor.
Earlier this month, Grace definitively went too far with her act. Way too far. On September 8, Grace aired a pre-taped interview with Melinda Duckett, the young mother of a missing two-year-old boy, Trenton Duckett. The woman was evasive when it came to answering Grace's questions about whether or not Duckett had taken a polygraph test and where she was during the hours leading up to her son's disappearance. Instead of leaving interrogation to the experts actually involved in the case, Grace took matters into her own hands. She became increasingly angry and accusatory. "Ms. Duckett, you are not telling us for a reason. What is the reason?" Grace demanded, pounding her fist on the table. "You refuse to give even the simplest facts of where you were with your son before he went missing." As the interview aired, text appeared on the bottom of the screen informing us that Melinda Duckett had taken her own life just hours earlier.
Grace's nightly crime-themed talk show quickly became popular among news viewers, and she is now a relatively famous face. Grace's habits of interrupting her guests, slamming defense attorneys (she even went so far as to compare them to guards at Auschwitz) and holding a "guilty until proven innocent" viewpoint on nearly every case have become her trademarks. Grace favors cases where the victims are attractive white females. Last summer she devoted countless episodes to covering the Natalee Holloway disappearance in Aruba; she continued covering the case long after there was any real news to report. Grace often seems to delight in condemning potential suspects before they have even so much as been named suspects by investigators. The whole time she constantly reminds us that she is a crime victim herself, implying that her fiancé's death justifies her increasingly inappropriate on-air demeanor.
Earlier this month, Grace definitively went too far with her act. Way too far. On September 8, Grace aired a pre-taped interview with Melinda Duckett, the young mother of a missing two-year-old boy, Trenton Duckett. The woman was evasive when it came to answering Grace's questions about whether or not Duckett had taken a polygraph test and where she was during the hours leading up to her son's disappearance. Instead of leaving interrogation to the experts actually involved in the case, Grace took matters into her own hands. She became increasingly angry and accusatory. "Ms. Duckett, you are not telling us for a reason. What is the reason?" Grace demanded, pounding her fist on the table. "You refuse to give even the simplest facts of where you were with your son before he went missing." As the interview aired, text appeared on the bottom of the screen informing us that Melinda Duckett had taken her own life just hours earlier.
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