For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing my part to revive the effort to repeal the Military Commissions Act. The Military Commissions Act is one of the worst laws in American history, so dangerous to our democracy that the editorial board of the New York Times refers to it as our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The Military Commissions Act repeals habeas corpus, ends enforcement of the Geneva Conventions, legalizes torture, gives legal amnesty to George W. Bush and other top officials for war crimes, sets up a committee that serves at the pleasure of the President which has the power to take away people’s legal rights without any judicial review, and establishes kangaroo courts with absurdly low standards of justice to replace ordinary criminal courts. Scary, huh?

You’d think that, with this law now in place, Americans would be clamoring to do something about it. Sadly, no. There are more important things for us to pay attention to. Things like the phenomenon of Anna Nicole Smith.

This isn’t just a negative, sarcastic comment. It’s a social reality, and I’ve got the evidence to back up my claim.

Yesterday, I did a Google search for the phrases “Military Commissions Act” and “Anna Nicole Smith” on the web sites of the three most prominent television news networks and for the web in general. Here’s what I found:

Fox News has the lowest ration of articles containing the phrase “Military Commissions Act” to articles containing the phrase “Anna Nicole Smith”. There are just 53 articles on the Fox News web site that mention the Military Commissions Act. There are, on the other hand, 36,800 articles on Fox News that mention Anna Nicole Smith. That places articles that mention the Military Commissions Act at just 0.14 percent of the number of articles that mention Anna Nicole Smith on Fox News.

CNN does only just a little bit better, with articles mentioning the Military Commissions Act at 0.15 percent of the number of articles that mention Anna Nicole Smith. There are 22 articles on CNN.com that mention the Military Commissions Act, and 14,400 that mention Anna Nicole Smith.

At first, MSNBC seems to do better. In a way, that network outperforms Fox News and CNN, with Military Commissions Act articles at 3.91 percent of the number of Anna Nicole Smith Articles. However, the reason that MSNBC does better is not that it reported on the Military Commissions Act more, but rather that it reported on Anna Nicole Smith less, with 22 articles on MSNBC mentioning the Military Commissions Act - the same number as CNN, but only 563 mentioning Anna Nicole Smith.

It would be easy to blame these huge institutions of mass journalism for the failure to spread the word about the Military Commissions Act. However, the truth is that the blame is much wider. When I searched the whole web, to compare the number of web pages mentioning the Military Commissions Act and the number of web pages mentioning Anna Nicole Smith, the result was comparable to what was available from MSNBC. The number of pages related to the Military Commissions Act was only 3.34 percent the number of pages related to Anna Nicole Smith. There were 658,000 articles about the Military Commissions Act, and 19,700,000 articles about Anna Nicole Smith.

Tonight, as I was writing this article, it occurred to me to see if this slant in media attention to Anna Nicole Smith held here at Irregular Times too. I was relieved to see that, in fact, we have the opposite slant. Google records Irregular Times as writing 441 articles that mention the Military Commissions Act, and just 4 articles that mention Anna Nicole Smith. We’ve got more articles that mention the Military Commissions Act than Fox News, CNN and MSNBC combined.

It seems that we’re oddballs here at Irregular Times. Our values don’t match the values of the majority in the media. I think we knew that, though, even before we started the web site. That’s why we decided to call this web site Irregular Times in the first place.

We happen to think that a major assault on America’s freedom deserves more attention than the life and death of a fashion model. Most others in the media, especially the large news networks, don’t agree with us in that decision. While our liberty dies, most of America is too entertained to care.