"Well, you think we'd be leading with THAT story..."
June 27, 2007 7:20 PM   Subscribe

Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC channels the popular outrage over Paris Hilton oversaturation during a time when mainstream media has grown bored with the war.
posted by hermitosis (73 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
They're not the only ones- US Weekly is going 100% Paris Free this week. Although that could be because they're bitter about People magazine got the exclusive interview.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:26 PM on June 27, 2007 [1 favorite]


about = that
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:26 PM on June 27, 2007 [1 favorite]


staged?
posted by Shanachie at 7:28 PM on June 27, 2007


Of course, the YouTube video stops once Brzezinski starts actually talking about Lugar and Iraq...hard to blame the mainstream media entirely.
posted by BT at 7:29 PM on June 27, 2007 [7 favorites]


I doubt it... that shredder already had a camera pointed at it when she went over there.... The control room knew it was coming...
posted by Shanachie at 7:31 PM on June 27, 2007


So she has problems talking about celebrity pr0n but has no problem talking about war pr0n? I'm sorry but the mainstream media trying to gain a "conscious" after it's behavior over the last five years is pretty ridiculous. Fighting against a story about a celebrity is not any real "fight" of any sort. Her reaction gives the story more life. Her little "rebellion" is still Paris centric.

This might not be staged but it doesn't really mean anything either. A million little tantrums a revolution does not make.
posted by Stynxno at 7:33 PM on June 27, 2007 [1 favorite]


WE'RE! STILL! TALKING! ABOUT! HER!
posted by ColdChef at 7:34 PM on June 27, 2007 [4 favorites]


Yes indeed, Stynxno, yes indeed.
posted by Divine_Wino at 7:34 PM on June 27, 2007


(Paris, I mean.)
posted by ColdChef at 7:34 PM on June 27, 2007


I enjoy talking about Paris.
posted by Stynxno at 7:37 PM on June 27, 2007


Actually, ColdChef, the comments so far are all about the show, the taping, and the media. Count name mentions in the comments and yours is the second.
posted by hermitosis at 7:37 PM on June 27, 2007


We will, apparently, always have Paris.
posted by WolfDaddy at 7:38 PM on June 27, 2007 [3 favorites]


Okay, third. Stynxno's comment was so dense with truth-tellinness that his mention bamboozled my spamfilter.
posted by hermitosis at 7:38 PM on June 27, 2007


I meant "We" as in "the whole of mankind." Sorry for my vagueness.
posted by ColdChef at 7:39 PM on June 27, 2007


Sadly, it appears staged. Remember, they're aware this is entertainment, and melodrama isn't limited to bigoted, anorexic, privileged rich inheritees.
posted by FormlessOne at 7:39 PM on June 27, 2007


I love paris in the spring time
I love paris in the fall
I love paris in the summer when it sizzles
I love paris in the winter when it drizzles

I love paris every moment
Every moment of the year
I love paris, why oh why do I love paris
Because my love is here
posted by edgeways at 7:40 PM on June 27, 2007


It's cold comfort, but still a classy move on her part IMO.

Say what you will about Cindy Sheehan, but when she states that Americans care more about American Idol than the thousands of dead kids in Iraq? She's 100%, absolutely fucking right. And honestly, I'm looking at you, red-states, on this one.
posted by bardic at 7:41 PM on June 27, 2007 [1 favorite]


You know who also loved Paris?
posted by Stynxno at 7:41 PM on June 27, 2007 [5 favorites]




(IMO, I thought it was real. But I guess I can't be so sure.)
posted by bardic at 7:45 PM on June 27, 2007


Amusing, but staged, and irrelevant:

As if Paris Hilton is THAT MUCH WORSE than their precious "missing woman" and "runaway bear" stories *rolleyes*.

Truth, that is.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:51 PM on June 27, 2007


D'oh! Still no "Paris Hilton FPP" flag.

Get a move on, admins! Once we have that flag we can win the battle against skanky dipshit oversaturation. Or it might mean we have already lost the war. I'm not entirely sure.
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:51 PM on June 27, 2007


Brzezinski fought with her producer to remove Paris Hilton as the lead story so that she could go with what? What? Iraq? Iraq's not news. Iraq's a deathtrap and we Americans fell right into it like a nation full of idiots.

The producer wanted to lead with Paris Hilton because he knows that the second Brzezinski started talking about Iraq, hundreds of thousands of TV remote controls went CLICK! And their owners went "Oh Look! Paris Hilton's on FOX News! I wonder if she's out of jail yet - well whaddaya know?"

You'd think after the Crusades a thousand years ago we woulda taken the hint - don't FUCK with the Middle East! Leave it alone. Let them fight over sand. Stay the fuck out of it. Buuuuuuut Nooooooooooooo!! We gotta go in there like a bunch of cowboys and show those guys how it's done, don't we? We gotta watch them blow up a few hundred people so WE can blow up a few hundred MORE people than THEY can blow up, so we can prove we're BETTER!

I'd rather watch Paris Hilton walking from wherever to wherever, than see another report talking about how many people are dead in Iraq, and what's not being done about it. And I DON'T WANNA WATCH PARIS HILTON AT ALL.

although she's more attractive without the makeup

*gagging sounds as Zach has a coronary*
posted by ZachsMind at 7:52 PM on June 27, 2007




At least someone has a good sense of humor about this:
We at E! Online, meanwhile, will continue to deliver our contractually obligated 82 daily Paris mentions, in accordance with the terms of our Faustian bargain with the celebrity industrial complex.

Nonetheless, we salute our fellow journalists for their radical stance on the significance of Paris in our time. Fight the power, people. Fight the power.

posted by ColdChef at 8:00 PM on June 27, 2007


staged?

ya think?
posted by 3.2.3 at 8:04 PM on June 27, 2007


Ron Burgundy: You stay classy, San Diego. I'm Ron Burgundy?
Ed Harken: Dammit. Who typed a question mark on the Teleprompter?

posted by aeschenkarnos at 8:05 PM on June 27, 2007


staged?

Well, how did she know exactly where to find a lighter on that guy? To they go out for a smoke together on the fire escape during commercials? I mean she reached unerringly off camera for it and had it her hand within a second or two.

They're not the only ones- US Weekly is going 100% Paris Free this week.

Yeah. About that...
posted by George_Spiggott at 8:41 PM on June 27, 2007


Best of both worlds! She gets a Paris story and a Paris outrage story out of it. Everyone wins!
posted by Joey Michaels at 8:44 PM on June 27, 2007


How often does the shredder have a keylight?

(hey.... I just thought of a new segment....)
posted by longsleeves at 8:59 PM on June 27, 2007


The newsreader in question is the daughter of unspellable Carter Administration official Zbigniew Brzezinski?!?
posted by wendell at 9:03 PM on June 27, 2007


I mean talk about getting by on the family name...
posted by wendell at 9:03 PM on June 27, 2007


CarrieLee Asks do YOU care about Paris Hilton getting out of jail?
posted by ZachsMind at 9:08 PM on June 27, 2007


I honestly never get tired of hearing about Paris Hilton. I feel like she's my little sister or something.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 9:16 PM on June 27, 2007 [1 favorite]


Yeah. About that...

Man. Five stories. Just be thankful they're not covering her.
posted by graventy at 9:23 PM on June 27, 2007


Just what IS news anyway?
posted by ZachsMind at 9:26 PM on June 27, 2007


The newsreader in question is the daughter of unspellable Carter Administration official Zbigniew Brzezinski?!?

Indeed she is. You'll be unsurprised that shredding a story on Paris Hilton makes one part of the lib'rul me'ja. They're everywhere! (Of course, former GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough was on set with her and I think he was the one who called up the walk-of-no-shame video, to her annoyance.)

Brzezinski fought with her producer to remove Paris Hilton as the lead story so that she could go with what? What? Iraq?

No, with Congress. The story was about Congressional support for the war ebbing even among Republicans, which is much more important strategically to getting somewhere rational. I'm not sure what you want here -- to ignore the story until it goes away? That's the Bush Administration's whole strategy now.
posted by dhartung at 9:32 PM on June 27, 2007 [1 favorite]


Good for Mika.

And yeah...Paris Hilton IS cuter without the makeup.
posted by wuwei at 9:40 PM on June 27, 2007


If it was staged, it was done so only moments before hand and most of them were still winging it. The guy who took the lighter away from her seemed really concerned that she might actually put flame to the paper and seemed to want to get it out of her hands as quick as he could.

Not that I blame him, even if it was a discussed joke, unplanned fire on a set could be a really bad thing.

And to be frank, I don't care if it was completely faked and acted out by puppet versions of the new crew. The Hilton story was grotesque in the excess coverage that it got. It ran constantly for the entire day I was at work (we have TVs everywhere).

How many pretty white women were killed or abducted? And I need to know about the car chases that took place in LA? Oh, and what mundane thing in my house will kill me if I don't watch the 10 o'clock news?

Come on, as much as I loath this kind of reporting, it is miles and miles better than a days worth of coverage of someone who hasn't done anything.

seriously. I killed her and suggested a cannibalistic intent on MeTa a couple of hours ago and I didn't get a single news blip. MeFi is operating just as it should.
posted by quin at 10:05 PM on June 27, 2007


what mundane thing in my house will kill me if I don't watch the 10 o'clock news?

One never knows. Do one?

could be the atomic termites or the chinese poison toothpaste or the dogs next door or a stalker or the cyanide in the lumber or a close relative.
posted by longsleeves at 10:45 PM on June 27, 2007


Back in the Carter era, SNL used to do a Weekend Update segment called "It's the Big News with Zbigniew!"

It warms my heart that his daughter grew up to BE a newsreader.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 10:49 PM on June 27, 2007


Joe Scarborough really looks like a condescending dick in this footage by showing how little he takes any of this seriously. But that might be because he being usurped on his own show by some uppity woman. How dare she refuse to play by the rules.
posted by chillmost at 11:54 PM on June 27, 2007


Wait, there was a runaway bear?
posted by Snyder at 12:30 AM on June 28, 2007 [1 favorite]


This is newsworthy because Paris Hilton is something like a 40th-level Aristocrat / Prima Donna and we all know that Journalists have like a -20 saving throw against the powers of that character class combination.
posted by moonbiter at 3:00 AM on June 28, 2007 [1 favorite]


The most disturbing thing about this video was how rude and condescending her co-hosts were. The comment by the one guy about how Mika's father called her mousy and she was just trying to prove him wrong really rankled me - even though she's a fully adult woman, the comment implied she'd only try to do something brave or unusual as a form of acting out in the context of an immature father-daughter relationship and not because of any strong personal conviction or integrity on her part.
posted by cilantro at 3:54 AM on June 28, 2007 [8 favorites]


cilantro writes 'The most disturbing thing about this video was how rude and condescending her co-hosts were.'

Completely agree. It was almost as though they were standing back, sneering, and seeking to imply 'there's no way on God's earth that we would get involved in this kind of trivial bullshit', all memories of Clinton and his blow-jobs completely and conveniently erased from the memory banks as though no such issue dominated the news media for months and months on end.

All that coverage was probably produced by some women reporters. Or editors. Or producers. And then they just force us to read the lines like trained monkeys.

I have a friend who works as a freelance science writer. She's pretty successul and sells in most major markets. She has a strongly held view that this kind of trivia nonsense story now takes up such a huge chunk of the media as a whole, and where you pay for it is in precisely the sort of serious, in-depth reporting that she does.

Of course, if the public weren't so hungry for such stories, we wouldn't see them as often as we do. The frequency with which Paris Hilton makes it to the front page of the blue has to be some indicator of public interest -- even among the sort of intellectual and cultural elite types that read Metafilter. The media aren't stupid. British magazines knew all too well that if they put a picture of Princess Diana on the front, they'd double their usual sales figures. I assume the same thing holds true for Paris Hilton today

Now, shut up and throse journalists another banana.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:37 AM on June 28, 2007


> throse journalists = throw those, obv.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:38 AM on June 28, 2007


She's mad as hell and she's not going to take it any more!
posted by kcds at 4:54 AM on June 28, 2007 [1 favorite]


It's painful to watch... it's that moment of realisation when you going from suspecting that you might be kind of a whore to realising that you are a complete fucking dirty sellout whore instead of, you know, a respected journalist... on camera.
posted by chuckdarwin at 4:56 AM on June 28, 2007


god, I love her wonky eye.
posted by exlotuseater at 5:14 AM on June 28, 2007


See also John Swinton, 130 years ago.
posted by milquetoast at 5:31 AM on June 28, 2007


The most disturbing thing about this video was how rude and condescending her co-hosts were.'

I also agree, but c'mon.... is there any other word besides "jackass" that doesn't succinctly sum up what Joe Scarborough is?
posted by psmealey at 5:32 AM on June 28, 2007


Of course, if the public weren't so hungry for such stories, we wouldn't see them as often as we do.

I disagree. The mainstream media engenders and supports interest in such stories by pandering to our most base, prurient instincts. Just because those tendencies exist in human nature doesn't mean they need to or should be fed.

There wasn't much "hunger" for opposing viewpoints to Joe McCarthy, but somehow Murrow managed to soldier on despite it all. Maybe if a few similarly placed people in our time would develop the same conscience, the Paris/Britney/Lindsey stories would again be banished to the ghetto of the supermarket checkout line, where they belong, and we'd get back to real news.
posted by psmealey at 5:39 AM on June 28, 2007 [1 favorite]


I *heart* Mika Brzezinski. They should have let her burn it.
posted by Afroblanco at 6:33 AM on June 28, 2007


She just needs to find Jesus, He will help her channel that outrage into something helpful on her journy through life.
posted by Paris Hilton at 7:17 AM on June 28, 2007


Metafilter: Sort of intellectual and cultural elite
posted by wuwei at 7:18 AM on June 28, 2007


The most disturbing aspect to me is: MSNBC has a Morning Zoo program? When did this happen?
posted by fungible at 7:25 AM on June 28, 2007


There wasn't much "hunger" for opposing viewpoints to Joe McCarthy, but somehow Murrow managed to soldier on despite it all.

Well there is a diffrence, in that at the time "News" programs were not seen as profit-centers, but rather government mandated "public service" that broadcasters had to do in order to pay for their spectrum. When Murrow was taking on McCarthy, he wasn't making a profit, and it didn't matter if he lost any sponsors.

As far as too whether or not it was staged: Come on, people think everything is fake and staged. It's MSNBC and it's a "morning show" which is much more informal then a broadcast nightly news segment.
posted by Paris Hilton at 7:29 AM on June 28, 2007


When Murrow was taking on McCarthy, he wasn't making a profit, and it didn't matter if he lost any sponsors.

As I understand it, CBS was under constant pressure from their sponsors to put a muzzle on Murrow, which is where Fred Friendly's efforts to protect him came in.
posted by psmealey at 7:42 AM on June 28, 2007


I think this whole discussion is funny because I first heard about Paris here on MetaFilter.
posted by stopgap at 7:48 AM on June 28, 2007


For someone who didn't want to talk about Paris Hilton, she sure spent a lot of time on her. Why not state your case and then move on?
posted by etaoin at 8:42 AM on June 28, 2007


The control room knew it was coming...

The shredder would have been better lit.
posted by ao4047 at 8:58 AM on June 28, 2007


How often does the shredder have a keylight?

(Goes back to re-watch to see how well the shredder was lit)
posted by ao4047 at 9:00 AM on June 28, 2007


Can the woman not use a frickin' lighter, or was she just stalling until someone mercifully called her bluff?

Wait, there was a runaway bear?

Pfft, that's another sensationalized piece of no news, and in fact... oh, my stupid neighbor's scratching on my door, brb... RAWWRRRR!!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:06 AM on June 28, 2007


A lady known as Paris, Romantic and Charming
Has left her old companions and faded from view

Lonely men with lonely eyes are seeking her in vain
Her streets are where they were, but there's no sign of her

She has left us insane

The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay,
I heard the laughter of her heart in every street café

I dodged the same old taxicabs that I had dodged for years.
The chorus of their squeaky horns was music to my ears.

The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay,
No matter how they change her, I'll remember her that way.

I'll think of happy hours, and people who shared them
Old women, selling flowers, in markets at dawn

Children who applauded, Punch and Judy in the park
And those who danced at night and kept our Paris bright

'til the town went dark.
posted by Floydd at 12:19 PM on June 28, 2007


is there any other word besides "jackass" that doesn't succinctly sum up what Joe Scarborough is?

Dick.

Or my personal favorite, "pigfucker".
posted by mephron at 12:31 PM on June 28, 2007 [1 favorite]


Both are operative. Just that every time I see that beady-eyed rat and hear his inevitable top of his lungs verbal spew, I can only think "jackass", and nothing else. Jackass, jackass, jackass.
posted by psmealey at 1:29 PM on June 28, 2007


Mika, I used to watch you on ABC overnights and thought you were a ditz. Maybe you were, maybe you still are, and maybe this is something a man in your position wouldn't get away with, but nonetheless, right now I love you. You can go ahead and call if you like.
posted by litfit at 2:35 PM on June 28, 2007


Or my personal favorite, 'pigfucker'.

"Chickenfucker!"

Also: "Bear fucker...do you need assistance?"
posted by kirkaracha at 3:40 PM on June 28, 2007


/offtopic

What is the first known use of 'pigfucker'? My friends and I have been using it for years, I think it might even predate our being on the Internet, and ever since seeing it being used here and there, it's obvious that it's not something that we made up, and we probably appropriated it from somewhere.

So where did we get it? Is it from a movie or something?

posted by quin at 3:48 PM on June 28, 2007


First source I can remember using "Pigfucker" was the South Park movie. It's got to predate that, though.
posted by kafziel at 4:20 PM on June 28, 2007


What is the first known use of 'pigfucker'?

I can't say. First time I ever heard was freshman year of college, Chicago, Illinois, circa 1986. I thought it was uproariously funny at the time, but never incorporated it into my own lexicon, and eventually forgot about it. I did not hear the expression again until the summer of 1998, when BASEketball was released to audiences everywhere. The rest, as they say, is history.
posted by psmealey at 6:48 PM on June 28, 2007


"I like the idea of TV news talking heads spontaneously developing consciences and revolting against the producers who push infotainment at the masses. Let's hope this is the beginning of a new trend (before they're sent off to re-education camps)."

It is indeed a trend. The producers who push infotainment have noticed it is good for ratings, so you can expect to see a lot more of it until the next thing comes along!
posted by Eideteker at 8:42 AM on June 30, 2007


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