The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Countering obsessions

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jul 01, 2007
ePaper

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Countering obsessions

Michael Tomasky

Defiant American newsreader’s blow for integrity

Clip of footage viewed widely
In an unusually big news week

Silver Spring: When Mika Brzezinski, a presenter on the U.S. cable channel MSNBC’s morning show, refused this week to read a bulletin about Paris Hilton’s release from jail and even attempted to burn the script on air, she was seen to have struck a blow for journalistic seriousness and fluff-surfeited Americans everywhere.

It was 7 a.m., the prime morning news hour, when Ms. Brzezinski told viewers: “I hate this story, and I don’t think it should be the lead.”

She tried to burn her script (she couldn’t work the lighter), then tore it up and finally, after being handed a second Hilton script by a clearly determined producer, got up from her anchor’s chair and fed the new script into a nearby shredder, all on air.

“You’ve changed the world, Mika Brzezinski,” teased co-host Joe Scarborough. “At least my world,” she shot back.

She clearly spoke for many — a clip of the incident was viewed more than 250,000 times in a day on Youtube. But while many Americans may be fed up with heiress Hilton and actor Lindsay Lohan and the whole celebutante obsession, there still appears to be a greater number who cannot get enough.

Hilton gave her first post-release interview to Larry King on Wednesday, the same day as Ms. Brzezinski’s protest. It was King’s highest rated show of the season — 3.2 million viewers — and triple his average audience. She even outdid the Beatles. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with Yoko Ono and George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, were King’s guests the night before and drew about half her audience.

It would be nice to think that Ms. Brzezinski represents the vanguard of a trend, but one leading U.S. media observer cautions against getting one’s hopes up. “What you’re seeing in the media culture in this country is an almost crazed effort by traditional media to shore up an economic model that has been shattered by digital technology,” said Alex Jones, the director of the Joan Shorenstein Centre for Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “And that means anything that will produce ratings.”

Mr. Jones added that “there’s always this sort of breast-beating after ‘silly season’ moments like this,” and said nothing ever came of it. But Ms. Brzezinski’s act, he believed, “goes to something deeper: the feeling that people who consider themselves to be serious journalists did not sign on to do this sort of baloney.”

It was an unusually big news week in America on the non-Hilton front. On Tuesday, the Bush administration suffered a major blow when a key Republican senator, Richard Lugar of Indiana, signalled in a speech on the Senate floor that he might not be able to support Bush’s Iraq policy when it comes up for its next funding vote.

Mr. Lugar is respected among his colleagues, leading to speculation that other Republicans will follow him. It was in fact the Lugar story that Ms. Brzezinski wanted to read as her superiors kept shoving in Hilton scripts.

It was also a week when the Washington Post published a scoop-laden four-part investigative series on vice-president Dick Cheney’s influence on the President; when Congress debated and rejected an immigration bill that was th e most contentious piece of domestic legislation of the year; and when the supreme court issued controversial decisions that provided evidence of a sharp move to the right.