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Thursday, July 5

ZeitGeist - The woman who wouldn't cover Paris

The Paris Hilton incident

On June 26, 2007, near the beginning of Morning Joe, Brzezinski refused to read a report about Paris Hilton's release from jail. One hour later during another news break segment, her producer Andy Jones again pushed the story as the lead, ranking it over Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana's break with President Bush on the Iraq war, which Brzezinski considered more important. After several unsupportive remarks from host Joe Scarborough, she attempted to burn the story's script on the air, but was physically prevented from lighting it by co-host Willie Geist. She then tore up the script, and one hour later, got up and ran another copy of the script through a paper shredder retrieved from Dan Abrams's office.[2] The incident was quickly popularized on the Internet, and in the days that followed Brzezinski received large quantities of fan mail supporting her on-air protest as a commentary on the tension between 'hard news' and 'entertainment news.'[3][4]

Wednesday, July 4

PM 2.0 postscript


hAhA! Apparently:

The Downing Street YouTube channel has celebrated its one millionth viewing since going live just two months ago.

And they're claiming that:

The most watched clip to date is a congratulatory message for Nicolas Sarkozy, France's recently elected President, delivered in French. It has been viewed more than 350,000 times.


No it's not. When you add all these numbers and compare with all these numbers, Blair saying 'Am I bovvered?' to Catherine Tate wins + is waaaaay more viral.

Hurrah for Alan Johnston but Beeb blows web opportunity


Yes, I had a tear in the eye when I heard the news on 'Today'. The guy is incredible, the strength in his voice.

I have to say, though, that the BBC has missed a huge trick by not changing the image of Alan which sits on mine and - must be - thousands of other blogs and websites.

I posted in May about the brilliance of this widget:

> It's given to you as code, so they can change the image on many blogs now (they don't appear to be counting but it's now in the hundreds).

But - 17 hours after the news broke - they haven't changed the image.