Jeff?
Do you know how or why Nancy Grace's show was selected as the venue of choice by whoever's calling the shots wrt the astroturfing campaign for this book? I'm not asking because I suspect hijinks or anything. On the contrary, imo, there's not only nothing wrong with making coordinated PR a part of the overall sales and marketing strategy for your book, there's everything right about it. It's just that in conjunction with lbo's
similarly worded post to the activism subforum last Friday, the OP does suggest that whoever coordinated this one did decide that targeting Nancy Grace was the way to go. And....Okay. Since I've been totally at a loss wrt whether to write this post and in what terms to couch it for practically an hour now, I'm just going to spit it out. And if despite my best efforts and most heartfelt wishes to the contrary, I end up hurting, offending or antagonizing anyone to whom I never want to be anything other than a rock solid source of support and comfort, I very much hope that they'll forgive me for it. But I have a concern that I feel obligated to express.
And it's more or less this:
It's purely a judgment call, but fwiw, it's my seriously considered opinion that when it comes to advancing the cause of justice for abused, exploited and suffering children anywhere or, for that matter, everywhere, Nancy Grace is to cable television roughly as Ted Gunderson is to private investigation. And granted, that's a pretty meaningful "roughly," in view of the different roles they play and the significantly different types of risk that they accordingly represent. Nevertheless. She has a habit of leaving the scene of every crime on which she's ever condescended to focus her attention mired in confusion, battered by ill will and covered with muck for some of its key details ever to be very easily or clearly perceptible to whoever might be looking at them for the first time, from that moment onward and until the end of all time.
I mean, I'm not saying that it's flat-out impossible to step up to the platform she provides and use it as a bully pulpit for your own agenda without getting permanently trapped in the raging shitstorm of sanctimonious, spiteful, and self-aggrandizing hypocrisy that it's Nancy Grace's very special talent to brings with her wherever she goes. That would kind of depend on your agenda, your strength of purpose, and how well you'd packed for the weather when you first set out, among many other things. But she really seems to me like the absolute worst not the absolute best PR opportunity imaginable for Nick Bryant. The specifics of her track record wrt confabulating intense emotional drama practically couldn't be better-suited to undermine the credibility of his story if they'd been custom-ordered for that purpose. And her lack of any and all scruple or restraint wrt to whether she's practicing journalism or simply in the business of exciting the most voyeuristic instincts of her audience by showing a special interest in the plight of whatever badly wounded, vulnerable and poorly defended victims of sexual predation happen to have the attributes most culturally likely to be viewed salaciously doesn't exactly augur very well for it either.
I don't understand what recommended the choice to whoever made it, in a nutshell. In some vaguely objective way, I know that it's probably not that big of a deal, but it's been niggling at me all day. I'm afraid of it. Literally, though perhaps not rationally. Thinking about it makes me fear for the safety of children.
That's ridiculous, right?
