It was definitely newsworthy, as the prosecutors are trying to put him in prison for life, but I have a feeling this is going to be another circus.

We went through this only a few weeks ago with Britney Spears’ botched MTV Video Music Awards performance and only a few weeks before that with the Michael Vick dogfighting case.

Today’s media is eerily beginning to resemble the “yellow journalism” at the turn of the last century.

For those of you not familiar with the term, yellow journalism refers to the sensationalized tactics and lurid features used in the New York Journal and New York World newspapers as they battled each other for sales supremacy.

The two owners, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, often resorted to making up stories to sell papers and are commonly blamed for causing the Spanish-American War after repeatedly calling for it in the news.

Nowadays, it seems even the larger news networks — the ones that are supposed to be the most respected — are turning to the same tactics to grab ratings, reporting anything that happens in Hollywood as breaking news.

How am I supposed to respect a network that runs a two-hour program on why Lindsay Lohan’s career is over?

Journalism is supposed to be a profession of unequaled integrity and objectivity. It’s supposed to stand for the rights of its audience and inform them on the happenings of the world around them.

Instead, what we get is a solid month of 24/7 coverage of conspiracies about Anna Nicole Smith’s death and coverage of her “accomplished” life. After that, we got another few weeks of the Smith baby’s daddy sweepstakes. When the father emerged from the hospital with his arms raised in the air like he just beat Apollo Creed, we got another few weeks of debate about his paternal credentials.

Watching this stuff drives me insane. It leaves me wondering if Americans really have that short of an attention span.

Have we gotten that bored of the war overseas that we don’t want to talk about it any more? Or has the response of, “Bush is an idiot, get out of Iraq,” become monotonous?

The ratings push has taken the art of reporting from Watergate to the Simpson trial — which could be subtitled “Part 2: Who cares?” — and turned the media into a public ground to bash the abrasive figures in our society.

How else can you explain the unabated onslaught on the Duke University lacrosse team, all for hiring a lying stripper — who hasn’t done that?

Instead, the head coach was forced to resign for not controlling his players and was blamed for the team’s underage drinking. The season, which Duke began rated first in the country, was canceled entirely. The three accused students were made out to be disgraces to their families and their university and pressured out of school.

Yet, now that the prosecutor has been disbarred and the students have been exonerated, there are still few apologies from the ratings-hound media that put them in the situation, which brings me back to Simpson.

The media has hounded his every move since his acquittal from the double murder of his ex-wife and her friend in 1995. It seemed to many spectators of the highly publicized court case that Simpson had gotten away with murder.

Now it seems that our media, which had convicted him then, is trying to get back at him for what he has been cleared of and put him in jail for life. One of the accused even stated on Larry King Live that he believes Simpson was set up. After all, the casinos put sound bugs in all of their rooms, right?

I’m not here defending Simpson or anyone that is being lambasted by the paparazzi that our national media has become. It is the media’s job to report it.

I’m here to ask the media to remember what is most important. The actual news should never take a back seat to the tabloid fodder that gets ratings.

Even if Paris Hilton takes another trip to jail.

Joseph Terry is a State News columnist. Reach him at terryjo1@msu.edu.