MTV News' Gideon Yago is bidding the network adieu to pursue "creative ventures" on the Left Coast. Yago has been one of the slightly more tolerable voices of MTV News for the past seven years, but a screenplay sale to Focus Features has him packing his bags.

Idolator published his farewell note to his co-workers, which included this classy send-off, "I have learned a great many things during my tenure here...There is one lesson, however, that I consider far more valuable than all the others combined: our audience deserves integrity and respect. Growing up in America is a difficult, sometimes traumatic, often alienating, very strange proposition. In between trying to figure out who they are and what matters in life, there is a chorus of parents, teachers, people and pitchmen telling them what to think and what to do...please keep fighting for them and thinking of them in the fine work that you all do."

See, I wasn't kidding. Pretty classy. Too bad he's talking about MTV and not Youth Radio or something. While MTV News has produced some mightily worthwhile documentaries, including Yago's own work about young people in Iraq, this is the network that brings us My Super Sweet Sixteen, Laguna Beach and the latter day Real World. "Integrity and respect" aren't the first two words that pop into my mind when I think of what MTV's programmers are up to, but I've been grumpy since they took 120 Minutes and Liquid Television off the air.

[Via Idolator]