Comments on: Rebellion: Mika Brzezinski tries to light Paris news script on fire

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » Video: Bold refusal to read moronic celebrity news — or technical glitch?

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:13:43 +0000

[...] From yesterday’s “Situation Room.” TV Newser thinks this is Unhappy Jack’s Brzezinski-ish rebellion at having to read a story about Lindsay Lohan. Not so, I don’t think. Cafferty doesn’t read stories, he does dopey “question of the day” spots, and per the chyron here the question of the day had to do with the Pew poll on suicide bombings, not Lohan. What you’re looking at, I think, is a simple technical glitch in which someone put the script for the wrong segment in the Teleprompter and he’s telling them to put the right one in. Caff’s got no problem with the LiLo items; he’ll read ‘em, he just won’t like ‘em. [...]

By: Freelancer

Freelancer — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 07:19:51 +0000

Krydor,

Obviously I defer to your professional expertise, but would you agree that there’s a large difference between a standard news broadcast, which is timed to the split-second, and a yak-fest like Morning Joe? As other examples, Today and GMA aren’t anywhere near as tightly bound to the stopwatch as a regular 5PM news program. They don’t have each sentence scripted with no wiggle room. Scarborough’s show includes plenty of free-form commentary, so I don’t wholesale buy the idea that Mika’s action “screwed the control room”.

Yes, the producer wanted her to read the story they prepared as the lead, since her bit is newsreader. They wouldn’t forward the ‘prompter to the next story, and I’m sure he was talking in all the on-air earpieces saying that the video clip would run regardless. Scarborough could only go ahead and introduce it as it played, since it was obvious that Mika wouldn’t. Producers are like that, they don’t take well to insubordination in their little kingdoms.

For TheBigOldDog, maybe mock integrity is still a tiny bit better than no integrity.

By: radjah shelduck

radjah shelduck — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 02:31:18 +0000

I laughed so hard I fell off my chair and landed on my Mika Brzezinski!

By: Zaire67

Zaire67 — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 22:02:35 +0000

One celebrity drunk goes to jail on a PV gets all this coverage. She is just one,”when the traffic slowed in front of her” away from killing someone.

She may have “found” Jesus, but will she now “listen” to him.

By: manwithblackhat

manwithblackhat — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:59:04 +0000

This whole saga adds new meaning to the phrase: “We’ll always have Paris.”

By: Krydor

Krydor — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:33:05 +0000

Always Right on June 27, 2007 at 3:17 PM

That strikes me as a lead. It’s bigger hard news than Paris, to be sure. The editorial slant of MSNBC notwithstanding, that should have been first and Paris relegated to the bottom.

By: bmac

bmac — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:29:23 +0000

She’s on MSNBC, of course every story is gonna be slanted, that’s a given, just give her credit for one step in the right direction. If Greta did that, I’d eat my shoe, and call it tasty.

By: Always Right

Always Right — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:17:34 +0000

Mika was doing a great job of refusing to shill the idiotic Paris out of jail story, and I was right in her corner…

UNTIL…

it turned out that what she wanted to dump PH for, her idea of the TOP news story was:

FLASH: Republican Senator breaks with Bush and joins Democratic chorus to declare defeat in Iraq.

so I guess we see where her priorities REALLY are.

By: bmac

bmac — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:56:28 +0000

All you haters should get off this chicks case, staged or not, at least she did something to stop this asinine “coverage” of nothing.

By: soulsirkus

soulsirkus — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:52:40 +0000

Kind of hot? She’s smokin. Come on Mika light my fire!
“Smokin” is a kind of hot.

Now back off, she’s mine!

Kensington on June 27, 2007 at 1:54 PM

Sorry Kensington, my bad. I’ll take Anne Coulter then. She would be a cheaper dinner date anyway….

By: Blake

Blake — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:43:33 +0000

But, how is any of this going to get Allah his long coveted iPhone? And how is an iPhone going to bring out AP’s inner alpha male? (Maybe, all the girls will want him to show them his iPhone? Is that the plan, Allah?)

By: aero

aero — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:31:03 +0000

Ooooh! Does it work like the Ron Paul stories? If you type Paris Hilton three times does your hit count increase exponentially as the crazies converge from Google?! Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton!

By: jaime

jaime — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:18:03 +0000

Allah – didn’t I notice an article about Paris Hilton posted here a couple of days ago? I’d be interested to know if you have statistics to compare the number of hits it got with other articles posted the same day.

I didn’t view it, but I’d be interested to know if there really is a demand for that nonsense.

By: aero

aero — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:12:46 +0000

Another kind of news story I skip is the kidnapped blonde (or pregnant) woman story. I watch them once to make sure I haven’t seen the person and to get the gist of what happened, and then I skip them as much as possible after that. The coverage is just relentless! It’s not that I’m not sympathetic or that I think it’s not worthy of airtime to try to help find a missing person. But they just hammer such stories for days, weeks, months–even years–while nothing substantial changes in the case. And in the meantime, a few hundred more people have gone missing with never a peep from the news people. Infuriating.

By: aero

aero — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:07:38 +0000

Is Tiger Beat magazine now producing these news shows?

OrthodoxRobert on June 27, 2007 at 1:59 PM

No, BigOldDog is right about that part. The news channels are clearly responding to strong market forces. There is a demand for this crap. Many news watchers pretend they don’t care about these stories but obviously do. I doubt many of us hard-news junkies at HotAir fall into that category, but clearly there’s a huge market for junk news. I guess it’s the can’t-look-away-from-a-train-wreck phenomenon, or schadenfreude (enjoying seeing others suffer), or just plain ol’ wanting to feel better about yourself by seeing what a mess someone else is. I don’t know, but it’s annoying as heck to me. Keeps my TiVo skip-button thumb in shape, though!

By: Hilts

Hilts — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:01:56 +0000

Mika Brzezinski is she Zbigniew “Woody Woodpecker” Brzezinski’s daughter? If so, now I know how she got her job.

By: aero

aero — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:59:58 +0000

You’ll notice that the prompter was set to the Hilton script. When she trashed her hard copy, the control room did not follow and she went to the hard copy for the next story.

Krydor on June 27, 2007 at 1:54 PM

Good point. They also insisted on showing the Paris video footage that was supposed to accompany what Mika was supposed to be reading. And as someone pointed out earlier, it dragged on too long to have been a scripted performance. It must have dragged on about as long as the Paris story and accompanying banter were supposed to take. She kept saying, “On to the news now,” but they wouldn’t let her move on until I’m guessing the time allotted for the Paris story had run out.

By: OrthodoxRobert

OrthodoxRobert — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:59:51 +0000

I swear to God I cannot imagine anyone who watches news in the first place even giving a damn what is going on with Paris, Lohan etc. Are the folks at Fox, CNN, MSNBC etc under the impression that 13 year olds watch them? Is Tiger Beat magazine now producing these news shows?

By: Mojave Mark

Mojave Mark — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:58:18 +0000

I’m getting ex-wife flashbacks watching that. Ooof! She’s a real &!tch isn’t she? I love the way the guys were dealing with her. Bravo men.

Once you get to the linked page you HAVE to see the police chase end. A car thief get’s struck by a…

Let’s just say it’s poetic justice.

By: Krydor

Krydor — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:54:16 +0000

So, in your opinion, was this staged or not? Sounds like you’re saying it must have been staged or the timing would have been far more screwed up than it was.

Not staged, Joe and the other meat puppet spent a great deal of time trying to get the gal to go back to the script. They are playing it as a “wacky live TV moment” on the webpage, but it wasn’t. One thing out of place, and you screw the control room.

You’ll notice that the prompter was set to the Hilton script. When she trashed her hard copy, the control room did not follow and she went to the hard copy for the next story.

By: Kensington

Kensington — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:54:01 +0000

Kind of hot? She’s smokin. Come on Mika light my fire!

“Smokin” is a kind of hot.

Now back off, she’s mine!

By: Mephistefales

Mephistefales — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:48:34 +0000

Also…

If she can feign that incensed, damn the torpedoes, but still a touch fearful, cat-facing-a-Doberman look that easily, then she should be in movies.

…

…not that kind of movie, you pervs!

By: Mephistefales

Mephistefales — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:42:54 +0000

As for the timing argument for the staging theory: don’t morning shows usually have banter time built in?

I’m just sayin’…

By: soulsirkus

soulsirkus — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:40:20 +0000

Mika’s kind of hot; of course, many women are hot when they’re angry.

Kensington on June 27, 2007 at 1:23 PM

Kind of hot? She’s smokin. Come on Mika light my fire!

By: logis

logis — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:36:33 +0000

Cute idea, but amateurish implementation.

Hey, this is TV (sort of, anyway) — You need to plan out this kind of thing ahead of time. I’m sure that even MSNBC has production meetings. A brief announcement along the lines of “Hey everybody: I’m going to light a fire on stage, so please don’t wrestle me to the ground.” would have been appropriate.

As for the act itself, MSNBC has to do SOMETHING to get its ratings out of the cable-access range. Let’s face it: Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann can’t go much crazier.

Scarborough and company screwed up; even if they didn’t have any idea what was going on, they should have just let it pan out. Worst case scenario: she burns the studio down. And even that’s not going a net loss – you know at least some people will start tuning in if they think that kind of action is a possibility.