I usually don’t have a beef with the way people in the media choose to target their audiences.

Whether it’s BET cutting its news department in favor of umm…something, or local news stations claiming to be the best thing since sliced bread because they have a dopler radar but what I do have a problem with is the way CNN’s Nancy Grace consistently plays with the psyches of naive mothers everywhere.

Nightly she uses sensationalist journalism tactics and vivid imagery to attack the traditional values of these women and recently used the death of UNC student body president Eve Carson as her vehicle.

Grace, nearing tears as she usually is, linked the similarities between the death of Carson and of another woman at Auburn University. Alright, I’ll go with that.

Both of them were white, female, college students. Each was gunned down and left to die, both of them were seemingly on their way to bright futures.

All great points, but to suggest that one death may have been a crime of passion as one of her guests that night did and then to seriously entertain the thought that the other was the work of a copycat killer is utterly insane.

I give Nancy Grace all the credit in the world for raising logical questions on her show and trying to fill the gaps in every story but she habitually comes up with extreme scenarios to answer those questions and the tragedy in this is that somewhere out there there’s a mother with a daughter in college, who’s already worried sick and eating this crap up.

It’s not enough that they’ve had to endure shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois in the past year or the fact that could have just as easily been any one of their children.

Grace, who worked as a prosecutor before her television career and was even called out by The Supreme Court of Georgia during that time for taking her arguments too far, feels the need to sensationalize these tragedies with a television act eerily similar to the woman at the funeral wailing over the casket of a person she barely knew.

Her ‘this could happen to you’ style does nothing to ease the stress of a parent. Even worse is playing with their emotions during a time when their heart goes out to a fellow mother or father in pain is flat out wrong and that’s what Grace, who recently had twins, did the other night by raising reckless concerns for an already distraught public.

Bad things happen to good people all the time. Random acts of violence are just that, random, and Grace of all people should know that having lived through the murder of her fiancé by a coworker. Whether it’s the person that volunteers with sick children and dies in a car accident or in this case a campus leader killed in cold blood, there is very little a parent can do to stop that.

No amount of love makes bad things go away. But these parents blinded by the sadness take Grace’s advice and become overbearing and overprotective, none of which makes their child any less invincible, if anything it makes them resent the fact that they haven’t been able to live because the parent isn’t able to let go.

Good parenting in this country is at an all-time low, as evidenced by another segment of Grace’s show in which a mother sprayed her child with a pressure hose. A good parent is concerned about their children, their safety, their lives and the lives of people around them but senseless violence doesn’t skip a family just because a parent calls four times a day.

I know my mother worries about me, especially when she hasn’t heard from me and hears news about another mother, with a child near my age having to go through something as tragic as Carson’s case.

Situations like that will always hit close to home for her but one thing I love my mother for is not letting her concerns get in the way of me living life and I know when she peppers in a “be safe” or “be careful” at the end of a conversation, that’s her way of getting those worries off her chest.

Maybe it’s because I’m not a parent that I don’t fully understand where Grace is coming from but at some point parents have to let their children go out in the world and live, the same way someone else let them go, and as much as it sucks to say, it is a cruel world but to feed of the sorrow of millions of viewers is an even crueler joke on Nancy Grace’s part.

• Mike McCray