Another look at Nancy Grace

Reading Nancy Grace

I think it has the best summary of why these shows and their stories about missing girls dominate cable news:

The beauty part of the missing girls angle is that the story never ends; it's news that stays news ten years later. The girl is always still missing. Once you're missing, you're missing forever -- unless you're found, and that's even better. And if someone does finally get convicted, the story still doesn't have to end, because you can follow them through the trial and imprisonment, checking in at intervals with the victim's parents for doses of reliably gut-wrenching emotion.

Not only does tabloid television get high ratings, it's cheap as hell to produce. Essentially you are taking old archive footage from local stations and splicing in a few routine interviews to make it new. Night after night you promise the latest developments in the case to an audience who have no other way of knowing that there haven't been any developments.

Shirazi puts Grace into an ideological context, but that part of his argument is unpersuasive.

Nancy Grace is the first sub-ideological demagogue I have encountered. She doesn't shout about terrorists going nuclear in the Middle East or Mexicans pouring over our borders. She keeps things relatable: white girls raped by blacks in the tropics, and wives killed by their no-good husbands.

[snip]

When I was young, sympathy for victims was seen as the congenital weakness of the liberals, who were invariably called bleeding hearts. Today it is the conservatives who worship a cult of martyrdom validated by varying degrees of pain, revelling in stripes you earn by lashing yourself. So these days a TV personality denies being a journalist and dissociates herself from truth-twisting attorneys, and instead derives her authority by painting herself a victim speaking for other victims.

Glorified suffering is the bedrock foundation of popular conservativism. The real objection to the pathos of liberalism is that all external sympathy is misplaced, that any available sympathy should be drawn toward my own collapsed ego just as light is drawn backward into a black hole, that your sympathy and my own self-pity should merge perfectly with no wasted remainder.

First off, the writer ignores that the fact that the Aruba story has a white villan. Joran van der Sloot, like Scott Peterson, is a real life example of Tom Wolfe's Great White Defendant.

More importantly, conservatives are not the only ones pushing this tough on crime attitude. Clinton, Carville, and Begula used it in 1992 to prove that the Man from Hope was no liberal. A centerpiece of that repositioning was the execution of a brain-damaged man during the campaign in New Hampshire. (See here and here.)

Grace, like Clinton, panders on crime because it seems to be an issue that transcends ideology in a nation that is politically divided. Politicians want votes, anchors want eyeballs. Trivial issues and tabloid stories get each of them what they want.