Dear Media:

Please shut the hell up about O.J. Simpson. There are so many more important things going on in the world right now than whether or not a washed-up celebrity stole sports memorabilia that may have been his in the first place.

I know, there is an underlying issue of race in America tied to the story. Or at least there was the first time he made headlines in the 1990s. But if you really want to tackle that issue, take a look at what's happening in Jena, Louisiana. As many as 50,000 demonstrators are marching on the town of 3,500 today over a case involving six black high school students who are on trial for beating a white student involved in hanging nooses from a tree on school property.

Do you know how many items a search for "Jena" on Google News brings? 3,910. A search for O.J. Simpson has 14,140 results right now. Here are a few other important stories being overshadowed by your sensationalist obsession with the Simpson case:

• Habeus corpus (844 results) - Yesterday a bill to grant habeus corpus protections to Guantanamo detainees fell short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster and be considered in the Senate. By the way, the first Google News result I found was from a paper in Ireland.
  
• Combat time (1,409 results) - Yesterday another bill failed that would have required troops to spend as much time at home as they spend deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, essentially requiring Bush to scale down troop levels. This was a little harder to search for, but the method that returned the most results was searching for the bill's author, Jim Webb.
  
• Expansion of FISA (1,599 results) - President Bush is calling for an expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and Democrats and Republicans alike are debating how much leeway the government should be given when spying on U.S. citizens.

That's just based on a quick search of Google News and doesn't include the cable news programs, which tend to be more superficial and sensationalist than newspapers and online publications.

I could have easily addressed this letter to the American public instead of you, the media. We continue to consume this information and encourage your sloppy reporting, after all. But you're the ones with something to lose. Your credibility is at stake, which isn't good when you're already losing readers and viewers to blogs and other new media outlets (I won't get into the numbers, but a Google Blogsearch returns many more results for Jena than for O.J. Simpson).

I know it's easier to cover a celebrity scandal than something substantive because you get an immediate ratings boost without doing much research or actual reporting. But many people don't care as much as you do about the latest exploits of Michael Jackson or Paris Hilton or O.J. Simpson.

You're more willing to report on an inconsequential act committed by a celebrity than something extremely consequential with no personality to attach to it. I don't mind when celebrities take up causes like environmental protection or genocide in Darfur, because lately that's the only way you'll really dedicate airtime to those issues. News has become indistinguishable from entertainment, and you've devolved into a conglomerate of unprofessional tabloids.

At one time the press was considered more than a business. Thomas Jefferson, for example, put the press on a pedestal and considered it the greatest asset of a free nation. He said, "Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light."

You have let that light burn out.

Sincerely,

A former reader/viewer