The Michael Jackson acquittal provides a golden opportunity to consider the phenomenon that is Nancy Grace.
Grace, who has enjoyed relatively high ratings and sudden stardom as host of her eponymous prime-time show on CNN Headline News, held up on camera yesterday what she called a “crow sandwich” after Jackson was found innocent. (Viewers never got to see her eat the sandwich, of course. We suspect turkey.)
Why did Grace feel the need to eat “crow”? Because she has repeatedly made it clear that she disdains Jackson and believes him to be guilty, guilty, guilty. And while Grace didn’t go quite as far as Fox News’ Shepard Smith after the verdict — who, over a shot of Jackson speeding away from the courthouse, angrily thundered, “This is wrong, and you’re a freak!” — she seemed, as the AP reports, uncharacteristically close to tears.
Deeming Jackson “not guilty, by reason of celebrity,” Grace hauled onto the air Paul Rodriguez, the Jackson jury foreman, just so she could berate him. Grace insisted that Jackson was “sleeping with a 13-year-old boy 365 nights in their underwear,” and declared that his settlements with previous accusers suggested his guilt, adding, “Hello?!” Rodriguez responded that the jury didn’t have enough evidence to convict — a determination, incidentally, which was applauded by many observers.
But Grace rarely allows the uncomfortable details of a case — in this one, for example, the accuser’s family’s lack of credibility — to get in the way of her convictions. To her, as to Shepard Smith, Jackson is a freak, and for that he deserves to pay. What kind of lawyer, one might wonder, thinks in such terms?
One who considers herself, first and foremost, a victim’s rights advocate, largely because of an incident she brings up with disconcerting regularity on her show — the murder of her fiancee during a mugging 25 years ago. That defining moment, she says, drove her into law. It also, seemingly, helped make her what she is today — a snarling southern belle whose seemingly sweet demeanor inverts whenever she opens her mouth. To borrow from the Bard, she’s full of sound and fury, saying almost nothing of value, but signifying everything wrong with cable news.
Grace, of course, is ostensibly not just a lawyer but a journalist. Her show, CNN tells us, “is television’s only justice themed/interview/debate show.” That artfully-worded description gives her a little more wiggle room than a conventional correspondent might have, but the fact is the show appears on Headline News, and is thus, in theory, “news.” But news is not the business she’s in — as The New Republic put it in a must-read cover story, she seems to believe “arrest is tantamount to guilt.” She says her declarations of someone’s guilt are only statements of the obvious. She deemed Scott Peterson guilty eight days before he was even charged with the crime. “‘You don’t think Peterson did it? Hell yeah, he did it,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to do, pretend on TV that he didn’t do it? … The cases I’m sure about I feel very confident about.'”
She’s not always right — as the Jackson case, and the Chandra Levy case before it, proved — but she revels in it whenever a jury does vindicates her point of view. As The New Republic pointed out, once, during one of Grace’s frequent appearances on “Larry King Live,” Scott Peterson’s father called in to attack her for having “crucified my son on national media” and acting “as a judge and jury” — which must have made Peterson’s eventual conviction that much sweeter for her. (When the verdict came down, she triumphantly asked a legal analyst on Court TV who had disagreed with her, “How are those sour grapes tonight? How are they tasting?”)
This isn’t the behavior of a newsperson, of course. Even Geraldo Rivera gets that: He recently said, “I think there is really something very sleazy about giving so-called legal commentary that is really no more than your own vitriol thinly disguised. If you’re going to sit up there as an attorney, then you review it as an attorney, review the facts and circumstances.” But Grace borrows the credibility of journalism to paper over what’s painfully obvious: that she is to law what Bill O’Reilly is to politics — a condescending and contemptuous bully out to satisfy her rampaging id. Nostrils flaring, she seems to take a tremendous amount of pleasure in her self-righteous condemnations of those she’s decided are guilty. As a legal analyst, she’s a disaster — she gives her emotions primacy over her capacity for reason, making it impossible for her to see the nuances of a case such as Jackson’s. As a news anchor — ostensibly a neutral arbiter of the issues at hand — she’s even worse. Her premature pronouncements of guilt go against the very basis of the legal system, the presumption of innocence until otherwise proved.
She’s also a constant reminder — lest we forget — that networks guided by the bottom line are more concerned with generating ratings than good journalism. It’s almost a surprise that she took so long to arrive in our living rooms — after all, talk radio put multiple Nancy Grace’s on the air long ago.
The irony is that while Grace corrupts our beliefs about the law (just as O’Reilly does with politics and social issues), public faith in actual journalists — the ones who get out and report, who don’t judge too quickly or stack the deck too heavily — declines.
So it is that we find ourselves in an age when people flip to a favored television channel, or buy a specific publication, or click on a particular URL, for one reason — because they know that when they go there, inconvenient information will not intrude, and they will find their dearest beliefs, their strongest prejudices and their deepest fears reinforced rather than challenged.
The phenomenon doesn’t have a name yet — to our knowledge, anyway — but it’s the opposite of the ancient Greek agora or the New England town hall to which people flock to disagree with one another and to hash out differences.
Maybe we could call it Graceland.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.