March 18, 2009 (77/365)

(I would have posted this last night but couldn't figure out for the life of me why the page wouldn't load. I thought there was a problem with my cable connection. This morning I remembered I'd turned off my javascript last night thinking it was interfering with some pages I was looking at. I forgot to turn it back on. Dopey me.)


Nancy Grace and her ilk are pissing me off. She's not a reporter or even a news anchor, she's a grandstanding sensationmonger. She spends hours ...hours... on the biggest news network in the world, harping on the minutia of the latest hot child abduction case. She trots out any tiny detail, legitimate or solid as smoke, and shoves it under the magnifying glass of the cameras until it appears crucially important. It's not just the media sensationalism that grinds my gears (we've been barely-tolerating that since Geraldo Revera crawled from the slime), it's that she, and all the others like her, seem driven to "break the case." Like it's her job to investigate ongoing cases above and beyond the proper authorities. She rails like a televangelist at how the authorities aren't jumping at the same shadows she is. While poor, poor little [insert name of currently missing child here] goes unfound or unavenged. Well she'll step up and champion that child because, obviously, no one else is.

These are headlines from her CNN-hosted web page today:
-"Breaking details in the Caylee murder case: Prosecutors release e-mails and videos to the tot mom's defense team. What evidence do they hold? Will these videos be released to the media? Nancy Grace has the latest developments at 8 & 10 P.M. ET."
-"LATEST: 7 PM ET - WESH is reporting the owner of the land where Caylee Anthony's remains were discovered [has put it up for sale.]."

In a similar vein, Headline New's afternoon host, Mike Galanos, yesterday announced that they would interview some politician or corporate board member and "get a confession out of them." For these people it's not about news any more, it's about breaking the case. Listen you delusional, self-important windbags, let's leave the investigating to the people who should be doing it and get back to reporting the news instead of trying to make it.

And unless Nancy Grace feels like going to the training academy and joining the FBI she needs to leave the "investigating" to the professionals and devote her efforts to something more suitable to her obvious skills, like shilling products on the Home Shopping Network.