All O.J. all the time - again
If you needed any confirmation that the world is in serious need of an attitude adjustment, you got it this week when O.J. Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas for armed robbery.
No, we are not talking about O.J.'s foul-mouthed rant or his "the-world-owes-me-big-time" swagger, although those attitudes are not as uncommon as we might wish.
Instead, what bothers us more than O.J.'s indictment is the self-indictment of the major national media outlets as tabloid publicity hounds that only care about ratings and not at all about their own credibility.
Hour after hour, it appears there is nothing more important in our country, in our world, than what some lawyer - any lawyer - has to say about the arrest of a man best known for getting away with murder.
We certainly don't want the story buried. A brief report about the initial arrest would have been suitable, buried somewhere at the bottom of the half-hour, but cable news coverage demonstrates plainly why you can't run a news-gathering operation on the principles of a retail store. You can't just "give 'em what they want," or else you give 'em junk food for the brain that makes a Big Whopper look like filet mignon.
And if CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC aren't chatting about O.J. and his posse (replete with the mysterious audio tape which really ought to be required at all felonies) then they are falling back on stories about Britney Spears putting out a hit on her ex-husband K-Fed, Lindsay Lohan drinking to her success, or Hillary Clinton's cleavage. As the Beatles sang 40 years ago, "It's all too much."
Of course, we have no one to blame but ourselves. There is no one holding a gun to our heads and making us watch this stomach-churning idiotic drool, but we (the collective "we," certainly not everyone) keep turning on the channel and sitting still as we are slapped up-side the head again with yet another picture of O.J. in handcuffs, O.J. smiling at the wedding party he attended last weekend, O.J. in the Bronco (oldie but goodie), or O.J. being acquitted of murder in 1995.
Really, when you think about it, in some ways this is the world O.J. made. It was his celebrity trial for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend Ron Goldman that created the 24/7 cable news cycle which now tirelessly eats up and regurgitates every scandal, murder, kidnapping, rape, and celebrity faux-pas six ways from Sunday.
"Meantime," as Bob Dylan said, "life outside goes on all around you." The war continues to rage in Iraq, the presidential primary campaign continues without interruption, the national debt continues to be ignored, and U.S. manufacturing continues to disappear.
But you would never know it if you got your news from CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and even the three old-fashioned networks, which do their share of blathering about O.J. on their morning shows as well as the evening news.
The situation has gotten so bad that one non-profit group issued a press release Wednesday that made up quotes from O.J. Simpson and Lindsay Lohan about illegal immigration in order to try to get the attention of "the corporate media."
Turns out, according to the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, the U.S. Senate is considering an amendment that would grant amnesty to about 4 million illegal aliens, but you would not know anything about it based on the amount of news coverage it has gotten.
The PAC said wryly in its spoof press release, "We are going to start contacting celebrities about the important issues that can completely alter American politics and the fabric of this nation. Perhaps that way, we can get the media to actually warn people when the Senate is going to vote on a massive amnesty that a majority of Americans oppose."
After printing faux quotes from Lohan and Simpson, the press release noted that, "Britney Spears, the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby, and the parents of Madeleine McCann could not be reached for comment about today's historic vote."
It would be funny, if it were not so close to the truth.