Is Paris burning? On MSNBC she was

A nice little bit of journalistic theater Friday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, when co-anchor Mika Brzezinski refused to read an hourly lede story on Paris Hilton, tried to set it afire with a cigaret lighter and ran it thorugh a shredder that conveninently happened to be on the studio set. Staged? Well, MSNBC isn't saying. But a nice bit of stage business, anyway.

"I hate [the Hilton story], and I don't think it should be our lede," said Brzezinski.

The moment was captured on YouTube in all its glory. BBC News carried a brief account of Brzezinski's shtick in the entertainment section of their website. And Jemima Lewis, a columnist for The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London, commented on Brzezinski and the American media in general. What Jenkins said, I think, is important and right on target:

There is a thin line between respectable and supine, and American journalism has settled on the wrong side. Our own press [in the U.K.] is no less obsessed with celebrities, but we specialise - too much so, you might think - in tearing them down. In America, to be famous is to be worshipped unquestioningly. Hollywood stars demand copy approval, and get it - which is why you will never read an interesting celebrity interview in an American magazine.

It is also why the public loves Mika Brzezinski. Americans suspect that something is rotten in their Fourth Estate. They listen to the anodyne newsreaders, with their big hair and Colgate smiles; they munch through the dry, cautious news that's fit to print - and they wonder if they are being told the whole truth. They imagine that what's missing is "seriousness", but that isn't quite it. They need a press that is generally fiercer, more anarchic, less obedient. The word we're groping for, I think, is feral.

Feral? Why say that? Jenkins was giving a backhanded nod to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had accused the British media of acting like animals that have returned to the wild. She also said, and I think she was right, the Brits glory in a press that still retains the values of its working-class origins:

The British long ago accepted that their press is, as Tony Blair would have it, feral. Journalists in this country are despised, and we know it. Indeed, we embrace our lowly status with a perverse, distinctly British pride: we call ourselves "hacks", lest anyone should think we take ourselves seriously, and delight in Fleet Street legends of debauchery and low cunning. British journalism - both the profession and the end product - is tough, unscrupulous and, at its best, riotously good fun.

In America, different standards prevail. When I went to work at a current affairs magazine in New York a couple of years ago, my editor warned me that I was in for a culture shock. "American journalists," he said, "believe they belong to a kind of priesthood. Ever since Watergate, we have seen ourselves as guardians of the truth. That," he added ruefully, "is why our newspapers are so boring."

It wasn't always that way. When I started in the newspaper business in the 1970s, a lot of older reporters still only had a high school education. They were working stiffs, and they were proud of it. Now they're gone, and you have to have a master's in communications to get in the newsroom door. Nothing wrong with being educated. But I think we've lost something valuable, and I wonder if it's why newspapers -- and network television news programs -- are losing readers and audience share as the news product gets blander.