KEY POINTS:
NEW YORK - Mika Brzezinski's Blackberry is receiving messages at the rate of about one a minute. Some are from friends and colleagues, but most are from strangers. To nearly all, she is a heroine.
"I had one woman send me an email and she told me she
was weeping tears of joy that someone finally took a stand,' the American TV newsreader says.
Brzezinski's achievement was to raise a defiant fist in the face of one of the most powerful forces in the modern world, celebrity.
Working for the US cable news channel MSNBC, Brzezinski decided last week to refuse to read a news story about Paris Hilton.
To the amazement of viewers, she looked into the camera and apologised for the decision to put the hotel heiress's release from jail at the top of news, ahead of an important political story linked to the war in Iraq.
When her co-host, Joe Scarborough laughed at her words, she refused to read the story.
"No," she said, "I hate this story and I don't think it should be the lead."
Then she began to read the next item, opening with the phrase "To the news now ... "
The moment was the first of Brzezinski's repeated refusals throughout the show to read the story.
It has made her a heroine to people across America and around the world. Clips of her refusal have spread like wildfire all over the internet, especially via the video-sharing website YouTube, where the pictures of her shredding the paper that the story was written on have received hundreds of thousands of hits.
Many viewers of the clip have also left comments backing Brzezinski - "Finally, someone has come to their senses," writes one YouTube viewer.
Other media organisations are also now refusing to cover the Hilton story. At the same time as Brzezinski was making her stand, gossip magazine US Weekly was declaring its latest issue "100 per cent Paris-free".
Brzezinski said her actions were not planned, but at Thursday morning's news meeting she had felt she could not stay silent as the Hilton story was put on the top of the news agenda.
"My co-host and I had problems with the story at 6am, when we had our first morning meeting. I let my co-host Joe know, and he told me to go with my gut," she said.
Though Scarborough knew Brzezinski was going to make a stand, he probably did not know exactly how far she would push it.
"We were making a statement on our show. I hope making it will start to change something. It became like a piece of theatre," Brzezinski said.
After her initial refusal, Brzezinski was given the news list for the next hourly bulletin. Hilton was still top.
"My producer Andy Jones is not listening to me," she said, looking at the script.
Then she asked another journalist in the studio, "Do you have a lighter? Give me that lighter."
She grabbed the cigarette lighter and tried to set fire to the paper on which the Hilton story was written. The lighter did not work properly and was snatched away by a guest on the show. But the story went unread for a second time.
Undeterred, the producers put Hilton at the top of the bulletin for a third time. And for a third time Brzezinski refused to read it.
"I'm about to snap," she told viewers. Then she walked to a paper shredder in the studio and calmly shredded the story.
It was spectacular television drama. Her move, which had the blessing of Scarborough, could easily have been a career-ending disaster.
But for the moment at least it looks as if she has got away with it and perhaps even succeeded in making her point - that the news is so saturated with celebrity gossip that serious issues are not discussed.
"It's a big problem," she said. "I would hope for this to become a bigger conversation that we have to have honestly. We need to have an open discussion about what is news and what is not."
She says her bosses have reacted well, but she is still a little nervous.
"I don't think I am in trouble. But I am in meetings all day today so I guess I will find out."
Brzezinski, whose father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, has had a distinguished television career since 1990, including a stint as the main reporter for CBS at Ground Zero in New York after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.
And she is not having any second thoughts about Paris Hilton.
"No regrets," she says defiantly "Absolutely not. It was not a story."
- OBSERVER
