Jim Hightower

Finally, someone barfed over the "celebritization" of television news – and it wasn't a viewer, it was a television news reporter!

Okay, "reporter" is not what the people sitting at the news booths of TV studios actually are. They're news readers – perky personalities who are handed scripts and expected to speak the lines to us. Mika Brzezinski just couldn't spit out the words handed to her on the MSNBC set on June 26. That's because the news story she was to read was about that gripping topic of global importance: Paris Hilton.

Brzezinski looked down at her script and was, quite simply, stunned. She later said: "My skin was crawling. This was our lead?" Not only did she refuse to read it, she tried to set the script on fire. Grabbing a cigarette lighter from a co-host at the news desk, she attempted to deliver some real burning news. Alas, the lighter wouldn't ignite, and her fellow news reader pulled the lighter away from her.

Still, Brzezinski was having none of the Paris celebutant "news," so she simply wadded up the script and moved to the next story. Later in the broadcast, however, the MSNBC news director slipped the same story to the top of her news stack, expecting her to do her duty. Uh-uh. This time, she rose from the set and – with cameras rolling – walked across to a paper shredder, where she fed Paris Hilton right into the machine.

Plenty of other on-air personalities have muttered off-air about having to do infotainment "news." No less a sparkly than Katie Couric said in a speech that there's so little time for real news that "I don't think we need to ever utter the name Paris Hilton." But only a month later, she was on the air broadcasting the words, "Paris Hilton."

But at least, for one fleeting moment, Mika Brzezinski gave us live TV worth watching. You can see it for yourself by going to: www.youtube.com.