A Response to Nancy Grace

4/1/08

We have truly lost our way and sadly there are no breadcrumbs to help us find our way home. 

When a self-proclaimed “advocate for justice” can set herself up as prosecutor, judge and jury, using a platform that reaches millions in a matter of minutes, determined to skew public opinion to hers, we can witness, first hand, the final desecration of what was left of the American justice system.  Guilty-by-clever-presentation has now officially replaced innocent-until-proven-guilty.

There is no other way to say this, Nancy Grace, of CNN Headline News, is a profound disgrace to what was once the noble profession of journalism and moreover she artfully and diabolically combines her yellow tabloid sensationalism approach to reporting with her experience and inside knowledge of the legal profession.  To add insult to the injury, even as Ms. Grace leaves death and ruined lives in her wake, as she bullies through with her self-styled arrogant version of investigative reporting, she is never held accountable, and never looks back.  She is never required to retract or apologize for her often fact-limited and always self-righteous attacks on individuals who have the great misfortune of coming up on her radar.  And the now-dumbed down public eagerly tunes-in and slurps up her tabloid presentations, never stopping to consider that she has proven over and over that “justice” is not her real goal; only ratings. So, once again, everything comes down to it’s lowest common dollar value – even the balance of people’s lives.

I frankly, have no idea how she sleeps at night. But then, since she is always justified, always right, even when she is proven to be wrong (consider her vicious vilification of the Duke Lacrosse team), she is enabled by CNN to think she is godlike in her right to say anything no matter who gets hurt and therefore she is never held accountable.  Unfortunately, lives are damaged, sometimes incurring long-term injury and Nancy Grace and anyone else who believes the right to opinion is more important than truth hammers deathblows to what was once individual rights.

Nancy Grace is like a shark cruising the deep waters of human experience questing for her next feeding frenzy.  Now that she has zoomed in on the tragedy of the Neumann family in Wisconsin, she isn’t going to let go until she rips them apart.  Then, when her work is done, lives shredded, ratings up, her yearend bonus assured, she can move on to her next feeding.

What I know about this story is that the media has skewed it from the very first article posted by Fox News.  And as this has developed it has come to my attention just how far media will go to build a story, not just in the distortion of facts, but also literally in the fabrication of information. It’s so easy to become complacent and allow ourselves to be spoon fed news stories. And we, all too busy with our manic American lives, take what we are given without question and are swept up into the great stream of consciousness thinking.  This is the truly scary paradigm for me.  We are not allowed to think for ourselves anymore, we are not allowed to make carefully considered decisions for our own lives and that of our children. We are told we can pray but we should be praying on our way to the doctor.  How nice to have that option but I prefer to have the option to pray and choose not to go to a doctor given the plethora of information readily available about the decaying state of health care in this country, the admitted numbers by the AMA in the tens of thousands who die at the hands of inept hospital care or bad combinations of drugs.  Did those numbers sink in? Tens of thousands of people die or are irreversibly damaged every year by bad medicine. That is a sobering statistic given how much hype and fear-mongering the media spread over a few hundred deaths (worldwide) by the SARS virus! 

On the other hand, there are also tens of thousands of people who claim healing without benefit of medical care.  These don’t make to prime time news though and certainly not by the likes of Nancy Grace.  But nevertheless, they do happen and thus, if one is going to roll the dice, based on numbers alone, it would seem that faith healing is as good, if not better than bad medicines.  But the point is really this, those who would prefer to trust God instead of manmade meds do not have that choice because we have been brain-washed to disregard the bad track record of the medical profession and told to fall in line. 

Have you ever stopped to listen to commercials for prescription drugs?  Usually there’s a wonderful visual of beautiful people dancing, biking in a bucolic setting or otherwise engaged in a “life wonderful” all the while underneath the voiceover sites all the different possible side effects – “blah blah blah…and on rare occasions death”.  What? On rare occasions DEATH? Wait! Do you think someone should tell Nancy Grace there is another whole pool she could dive into –how about interviewing people who have lost loved ones to bad meds?  Oh, no, that’s not good; sometimes drug companies have ads that pop up during her show.  

So, here it is–our only choice: join the stream of consciousness thinking and stay good little sheep who are constrained from making individual choices for ourselves, regardless of faith, because, if we do and something goes wrong – we might just be getting a spotlight from the number one queen of sensationalism. 

Oh, what a wonderful world we live in now! Even as Muslims are granted more freedom to follow their faith, including honor killings, Christians are being told – step out of line and expect to be investigated, eviscerated and left to bleed out as the sharks turn to the next attack. 

April S Fields
Publisher