Journalists and other people concerned seem to be in an active rebellion against the almighty system that dictates what’s newsworthy and what isn’t. MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski made good use of her airtime to make this clear.

On last Wednesday’s (June 27) Morning Joe, she refused to read the lead story her producer gave her which is about Paris Hilton. She said she’s “done with the Paris Hilton story”, so she took the script, tried to burn it, and when that didn’t work she tore it to pieces. The second copy given to her ended up in the shredder. Later, Willie Geist (the guy beside her on the Morning Joe) had a web-exclusive interview with Brzezinski and noted on the shredder bit (which had been taken out on Brzezinski’s request) that that was a stunt. I quote Geist:

“The journalistic community has heard your statement, and it thanks you.”

She wanted to make a point, and I believe she did that. But what exactly was the point that she made? Don’t get me wrong, being a Journalism graduate myself, I’m certainly not for bombarding dear viewers and readers with Paris Hilton day-in and day-out. I’m certainly not for covering her stunts like we did Hurricane Katrina. We all know she’s enjoying the publicity, and I’m one with the crowd with the whole Paris-is-spoiled idea. But being a fan of irony, I’ve come to present you with an especially tasty one right now.

The effect of Mika Brzezinski’s “stunt”, although very noble (watching it on YouTube, I had to fight the urge to clap while in my quiet office), doesn’t quite hit the mark she should want to hit. Her name is big and juicy now, and many more people than usual will be struggling with her last name, but unfortunately, the all the current headlines with her name on them also have the word “Paris” in them.

Dr. Phil was on The Tonight Show, and he was talking about this irony:

…everybody is just tearing her up and ripping her up and saying that she is exploiting this whole thing. Then why are they talking about it? Anderson Cooper was doing it. I like Anderson. He’s a good reporter, but he’s on there talking about how absurd it is that he spent an entire hour talking about it.

And yet, there he was, also spending time on the issue. Heck, here I am, spending time on this issue.

The way I see it, the thought that journalists and other professionals cannot treat this issue like just any other issue, probably means that it isn’t. To me it feels like people are so adamant against it just for the sake of it, because people do care about it, enough for them to post so many comments on YouTube, enough for them to react. As long as people “fight” the issue, it’s never gonna die. If it’s true that the issue truly isn’t newsworthy, as Brzezinski (I’ve been copy-pasting her name all this time by the way) believes, then it’ll die down on its own.

But not if journalists, and bloggers like me, keep talking about it. Hey, I didn’t say I was blameless, I just said I’d talk about the irony.

Technorati tags: paris hilton, mika brzezinski, msnbc, morning joe, dr. phil, jay leno, the tonight show

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 3:21 am and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.