Not very graceful

Okay, I'm disgusted. Partly at CNN, for retaining the services of such a blatant sensationalist, but mostly at Nancy Gracer herself. Her latest accomplishment is the dead mother of a kidnapped 2-year-old.

The woman, 21-year-old Melinda Duckett, shot herself after taping an interview with Grace, who relentlessly hammered her about where she was when her kid was stolen. Grace wouldn't let the point go, even though the girl said she'd been told by police not to discuss details of the case, because the investigation was ongoing. Grace, not surprisingly, essentially accused her of negligence and complicity in the boy's kidnapping. Her tone was prosecutorial, and she sounded disgusted, as though she was talking to a criminal and not a victim.

"Nancy Grace and the others, they just bashed her to the end," Duckett's grandfather Bill Eubank said Tuesday. "She wasn't one anyone ever would have thought of to do something like this. She and that baby just loved each other, couldn't get away from each other. She wouldn't hurt a bug."

But still, of course, it could turn out that Duckett had something to do with her kid's disappearance. If she did, if the kid is dead in a field somewhere, then so be it, she's guilty. But if not, if she shot herself out of grief that she allowed her child to be kidnapped, then hopefully Grace will live up to her namesake and apologize to Duckett's family.

Either way, however, Grace was out of line. What she did in that interview was judgmental and accusatory, not journalistic. She acted like a cop, not an interviewer. Her taste for sensationalist stories has led her to cover topics like Natalee Holloway's Aruba disappearance and the Mark Karr arrest extensively, when other networks gave those matters much more cursory attention. She belongs on daytime television, without the credibility CNN brings to the table.

In short, Nancy Grace is a piss-poor representative of journalists everywhere, and someday I'd like to slap the shit out of her.