You Decide

But Grace wasn't satisfied with suspicion. She wanted to solve the case right there in front of a coast-to-coast television audience.

"Why are you not telling us where you were?'' Grace demanded, pounding the table. "Miss Duckett, you are not telling us for a reason. What is the reason?''

As the woman stumbled over her words, trying to come up with answers, a small yellow text box appeared at the bottom of the screen: "SINCE SHOW TAPING," it read, "BODY OF MELINDA DUCKETT FOUND AT GRANDPARENTS' HOME.''

That's right. Grace was interviewing a dead woman. Just hours before the taped interview aired last Friday, Duckett committed suicide at her grandparents' house.

Given the circumstances, Grace's grandstanding, badgering interview was bad enough. But the idea that her producers at CNN elected to go ahead and run the interview, even though they knew Duckett had killed herself, has veterans of television news shaking their heads.

"Look, Nancy Grace does what she does. She's an act,'' said Judy Muller, an Emmy-winning former ABC correspondent who now teaches at USC. "But to go ahead and air it -- that's despicable.''

The incident has rekindled the running debate about the ethics and the future of cable television news. Once, the idea of a network like CNN was all news, all the time. But now the cable news outlets seem to be staging a modern version of the Roman circus, and the louder the better.

"The truth of the matter is television has slowly changed as time has gone on,'' says Richard Wald, a former ethical standards director for ABC News who is a professor at Columbia University. "What started out as a conservative medium has become much more powerfully in your face.''

That's for sure.

Grace, a former prosecutor in Atlanta, made her television reputation by being louder and more aggressive than anyone else. She bills her show as "television's only justice themed/interview/debate show."

The scolding she gave Duckett was nothing unusual for her evening show. Viewers tune in to watch her grill guests. And she was anything but apologetic on Monday night when her show returned after the furor over Duckett's death hit over the weekend.

When one viewer called in to ask on the air whether Grace was worried she "might have somehow pushed her over the edge or contributed to her suicide,'' the anchor was unrepentant.

"I do not feel that our show is to blame for what happened to Melinda Duckett,'' she replied. "The truth is not always nice or polite or easy to go down. Sometimes it's harsh, and it hurts.''

Well, that's one way of putting it. Another would be that, with a crowded field of cable talk shows, from Fox to MSNBC to CNN to Court TV, it isn't easy to grab ratings unless you are the loudest and the most controversial. From JonBenet Ramsey to Scott Peterson, sensational crime stories draw viewers.

The idea is to cover the crimes, particularly murders, exhaustively, but make it seem as if it is a kind of public service. That's why, CNN Headline News explained, it went ahead and aired the interview even after Duckett killed herself.

Network spokeswoman Janine Iamunno provided us with the following statement on Thursday:

"We received the news of Ms. Duckett's death shortly before our special on Trenton's disappearance went to air. While we were saddened to hear of this development, our original goal in doing the special was to bring attention to this case, in the hopes of helping find Trenton Duckett. We decided to air the show, including a graphic announcing the news about Ms. Duckett, in keeping with that goal, and we will continue to cover the story until Trenton is found.''

See? They're actually helping with the investigation. And yet -- get this -- some spoilsports continue to complain that this was a sleazy and cynical play for ratings.

"I am not sure anymore,'' says Muller. "I used to think there were standards, but I don't begin to understand how someone can do this. Nancy Grace has become a parody of herself.''

That may be, but she continues to attract attention, if not huge ratings. Her show generally runs second or third among cable news outlets at the 8 p.m. time slot, behind Bill O'Reilly on Fox and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. But Grace has a formula, and she's going to stick with it. Wald compares the sleaze to pornography.

"The whole world will tell you that porn is horrible,'' Wald says. "But it is a multimillion-dollar industry that flourishes quite happily.''

So is there any hope, any light at the end of the tunnel?

"Sure,'' Wald says. "It isn't the light at the end of the tunnel, it is life. Someone will do something so egregious that it will become beneath our dignity and we won't watch. And it will change.''

And could this be that moment?

"Not even close,'' Wald says."................

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