Prosecutors in Las Vegas charged OJ and friends with crimes today, The media is back in action covering the charade—and as thoughtful news anchor Roland Martin explains, makes a bundle doing it.

His essay was carried on CNN.com. CNN is not the worst offender, but it is right up there:

Right now, as I type, lawyers across America are dusting off their resumes and DVDs, firing them off to talent heads at all the cable networks, looking to make their mark by cashing in on O.J. mania.

Oh, yeah, don’t think for a second that I’m stretching here. Everybody saw how many lawyers are now TV hosts, commentators and pundits. O.J. is a living, breathing reality show.

Anybody and everybody who has written a book or a documentary related to O.J. will be on radio and TV, expounding on a man many of them really don’t know. But hey, they’ve got books to sell!

You don’t think this is a big deal?

When Clark County Judge Nancy Oesterle — the appointed Las Vegas “media” judge — approached the microphone yesterday, she commented that she had never seen such a spectacle.

Yeah, I’m sure some will say, “It’s you, the media!”

But show me one media executive that ignores the O.J. saga, and I’ll show you a guy or gal without a job by the end of the week.

Remember all of the righteous indignation we witnessed when O.J. was going to publish his book, “If I Did It”? People howled, protested and blasted Rupert Murdoch and ReganBooks for days. And Judith Regan, who orchestrated the deal, which included a TV show, was ousted in the wake of the scandal.

And when the Goldman family got the rights to the book and promised to publish it, Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble treated it like a skunk, saying they would not promote it, and some demanded they not carry it in their stores.

Guess what? Over the weekend, the book hit No. 1 on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

So, who exactly is buying the book?

That’s right. You. It’s you, America. You buy the books about O.J. You watch these TV shows that go wall-to-wall O.J. You buy the magazines that feature him on the cover. And yes, we in the media churn this stuff out like clockwork. We are all rolling around in the slime of celebrity justice.

FROM OJ TO RUPERT

Meanwhile public interest media lawywr Gene Kimmelman published an op-ed in the Seattle Tims about why we should be concerned about a man who should be on trial for media crimes: Rupert Murdoch:

Most likely you have watched, listened to or read something today from one of Rupert Murdoch’s many media outlets. Murdoch owns Fox Broadcasting Company and 35 local TV stations, 16 cable channels (including Fox News Channel), as well as MySpace and HarperCollins publishing. Murdoch’s media holdings are inescapable.

And they just got bigger. With Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones, he will now own a No. 1 TV network, the most successful cable-news channel, two major TV stations in large markets like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and single stations in eight mid- to large-sized markets — along with The Wall Street Journal. The Journal adds to Murdoch’s empire the nation’s most successful financial newspaper, second only to USA Today in circulation.

Should we be concerned? You bet. And it’s not simply because it’s Rupert Murdoch — any single media owner with this much control should concern us. Television and newspapers are our main source of news and information and one person owning so many different sources of our news and information is dangerous to our democracy.

In the United States today, six corporations control most of what we see on television, one company owns more than 1,000 radio stations, and two-thirds of all independently owned newspapers have disappeared since the mid-’70s. This is an alarming trend.

STOP “STOSSELIZATION” AND DISTORTION AT ABC NEWS

Janet Firshein writes:

Dear Mr. Schechter:

As you well know, there has been a lot in the news of late about gaps in U.S. health care, particularly related to access to health care.

One of the more reported stories has been looking at how the U.S. system compares to those in other countries, including Cuba. In that vein, I wanted to share with you the attached letter to ABC News President David Westin from a group of the nation’s leading medical educators, public health professionals and scholars who have traveled to Cuba; journalists based in Cuba who report on Cuban health care, and patients who have received medical attention there. These professionals have written Mr. Westin strongly objecting to the “unbalanced and biased coverage of Cuban health care” on a recent 20/20 reported by John Stossel. The group, many of whom sit on the board of an organization called Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (www.medicc.org), which is based here, complain that Mr. Stossel’s piece “starts with a political bias,” is inaccurate and misleading to the public, and they are urging ABC to set the record straight.

In recent weeks, Mr. Stossel, a journalist whose stories influence public opinion, has been vociferously attacking Cuban and government-sponsored health care – not only on 20/20 – but also in an opinion piece that appeared in the September 13, 2007, Wall Street Journal and on a blog RealClearPolitics

BWARE BRITISH SATELLITE NEWS

My old mate and Media Channel staffer Bruce Whitehead writes from London about uncovering more media bias:

See my article from The Journalist about distortion and manipulation of stories by British Satellite News and the FCO, kindly hosted by Spinwatch here:

PUBLIC NEEDS MORE INFORMATION

Mark Llyoyd writes about our need to understand the analog to digital conversion:

Here is a link to Nancy Zirkin’s(Policy Director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights) testimony regarding the transition.

There is too little money set aside to inform the public about this change and a real danger that poor, minority and rural viewers will not get the information they need to participate in the coupon program. There are a host of unknowns (cost of converter boxes, public interest obligations of dtv broadcasters, service to the disabled, obligations of local cable and other multiple channel video providers to carry dtv streams, to name a few) and local engagement on these issues with pressure on Congress to make them accountable sooner rather than later is vital. It is not at all clear that PSAs will be sufficient.