I was walking through the cafeteria at work yesterday afternoon to get some ice for my water bottle when the televisions blew up with the news that Paris Hilton was headed to court in handcuffs. I had to get back to work, but I’m sure there was blanket coverage until the news broke that she was going back to jail to serve the remaining 40 days of her sentence. Now if the television would have been tuned to the E! network or another entertainment station I would have understood, but it was CNN that dropped everything to cover a misdemeanor hearing.

I grew up during the O.J. Simpson trial and I didn’t know what a landmark trial that really was. The trial itself wasn’t as important as the coverage the trial received. It completely saturated our entire culture: news stations covered each day’s events, late night talk shows and SNL made jokes, and Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran, Judge Ito, and Mark Fuhrman became household names. This trial was somewhat news, but the extra interest came from the celebrity of the defendant.

Over a decade later, the lives of celebrities have become “news.” If Lindsey Lohan gets in a fender-bender, it gets 4 hours of coverage on all of the major news stations. When Brittney Spears shows off what she should have kept covered, every newspaper and website covers the story. There seems to be a special place for Paris Hilton (who hasn’t really ever done anything in her life that is worth mentioning other than being born) and everything she does seems to be on the evening news.

There is plenty going on in the world that is newsworthy. The U.S. is fighting two wars in two countries and the administration is making noise about starting a third. AIDS and malaria are running rampant in Africa and abject poverty is one of the major causes. Human trafficking and forced slavery is still a major issue in a significant portion of the world. Millions of people have died or been forced from their homes in the Darfur genocide in Sudan. We are facing major crises in America such as health care, taxes, education, social security, and political corruption just to name a few. But who cares about that because Paris Hilton is going back to jail for 40 days. All that other stuff can just wait until she’s free again.