Just Like Fertilizer, There's A Reason They Call It "Spreading" Rumors...

When we were kids, the game was called “Telegraph”

Everybody sat in a circle; one person whispered a phrase into the ear of the person next to them, who, in turn, whispered it to the next person and so on until the phrase had gone all the way around the circle.

The fun of the game was in seeing how the phrase got mangled by the time it had gone from the first ear to the last.

It never ended the trip intact.

And the results could be pretty funny.

I was reminded of that childhood game this morning when I was perusing web news and came across a video of Nancy Grace on CNN.com interviewing some guy about pictures that have surfaced of the mother of this two-year-old girl who has been missing for a while.

The pictures show the mom drinking and partying and the gist of the interview was Grace’s implication that the pictures were taken AFTER the child had gone missing, the inference being that if a young mother could drink, laugh and party while her two year old was missing, then something was rotten in Denmark.

At the very least, Grace conjectured, perhaps the mother was able to party stress free because she knew where the child was.

What I found telling about the interview was that the guy Grace was questioning said, a couple of times, that no one was able to verify that the pictures were, in fact, taken after the alleged disappearance. Grace didn’t seem to let that little detail bother her as she continued to plow ahead, apparently determined to milk the maximum drama out of the situation and continue to imply that the mother was, at best, a poor excuse of a mother and, at worst, some kind of evil bitch who had harmed a child.

You’ve probably heard it said, or might have said it yourself, that the problem with “newscasters” these days is that they don’t just report the news anymore, they seemed determined to create it.

Nancy Grace seems to have a pretty good handle on that concept.

She’s not unique, though. Not by a long shot.

And the really insidious thing here, I’d offer you, is rumors are like herpes.

Once it starts, it never goes away, no matter what efforts are made to stop it.

And, despite our best intentions to give the benefit of the doubt about things we hear, the bottom line is that perception is reality.

And rumors give birth to perception.

People like Nancy Grace bother me. Because too often the only difference between a “nationally known journalist” and a garden-variety shit stirrer is the platform they stand on.

I’d find it a lot easier to buy that Nancy Grace and her ilk are, as they would have us believe, simply trying to help those in distress if she worked, quietly, in the office of some government agency, out of the public eye, going through the evidence and seeking, with passion and conviction, the truth, whatever it may be.

She doesn’t though, does she?

Instead, she and the others like her insinuate, intimate and sensationalize, walking an excruciatingly fine line between journalist and shit stirrer.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all these “crusaders” really are more concerned with rescue than ratings.

But it sure doesn’t look that way.

And perception is reality.