This column will doubtless strike a chord in some readers and anger a great many others. That’s fine. It doesn’t concern me that you might be offended by this argument. What angers me is the idea that you would dismiss it as bitter and give no thought to the points I’m about to raise.

Let me be upfront first. I do not hate Princess Diana, the British royal family, or any member in particular. I was saddened to hear of her death just like the rest of the world. What saddened me further was the amount of media coverage given to this event. This sadness turned to anger last week. Some of you may have heard that Mother Teresa also past away last week. If you hadn’t heard this, I’m not surprised. The day after her death, there were six articles on the front of the New York Times. Five of them dealt with the “terrible tragedy” of Princess Di’s death. In the lower left corner, a small article mentioned that Mother Teresa, the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner, had died in Calcutta, India. Here’s a woman who devoted her entire life to helping the poor and destitute of the world, and she is upstaged even in death by a gold-digger of questionable morals.

Two and a half billion people in sixty different countries watched Princess Diana’s funeral. TIME, NEWSWEEK, and U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT all devoted practically their entire issue to the life and times of the Princess of Wales. Hardly any mention was made of someone who was truly a saint.

Mother Teresa wasn’t the only news event overlooked during the soap opera that was last week. I doubt many of those 2.5 billion people knew that a bomb went off in an Israeli marketplace, killing 8 people and wounding 180 others. They probably have no idea that Mobutu Sese Seko, dictator of Zaire, also died last Sunday. Apparently these events were not as important.

The thing that really made me laugh was an article in this week’s NEWSWEEK, where celebrities talked about the sacrifices they make to be in the public eye. The hardships they have to go through. Give me a break. As if that weren’t ridiculous enough, the panel of celebritites they interviewed bordered on ridiculous. Ellen Degeneres, Sean Penn and Tom Selleck all spoke of how tough it is to be famous. Two has-beens and one would-be talking about fame.

Maybe I’m just cynical, but I think there are more important things in this world to be sad about than the death of another elite.