Did you see what I saw.......?

While I sat watching the News rather disinterestedly there seemed to be some unexpected developments on screen. Sat wondering if it was some break in communication at the studio, not for long though.

An interesting article says it all, but takes the fervour out of the action with that doubt …”Was it stage managed?”

Appended below is the article.Read on….

I have a new hero and her name is Mika Brzezinski

Richard Adams in Washington
Saturday June 30, 2007
The Guardian
It was Peter Finch, in the 1976 movie Network, who first played a newsreader suffering an on-air breakdown. Driven to madness by poor ratings, Finch's character snaps and tells viewers to shout: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more."

It's hard not to think of Finch, who won an Oscar for his performance, when watching a similar implosion by the newsreader Mika Brzezinski on the cable news channel MSNBC on Wednesday morning.

Despite goading from her co-hosts, including the former Republican congressman turned rightwing talkshow host Joe Scarborough, Brzezinski stood her ground and refused to read her segment's lead news item on Paris Hilton.

After a media frenzy that saw even arch-publicist Michael Moore elbowed off CNN's Larry King show to make way for Hilton's first post-jail interview, Brzezinski has become a cyberspace star. Clips of her shredding the script were the lead item on the Technorati search, while the blogosphere was alight with praise. "I have a new hero, and her name is Mika Brzezinski," wrote one.

For many people, the Hilton kerfuffle was the first time they had heard of Brzezinski, an experienced newscaster and journalist.

While she does pop up on the mainstream NBC Nightly News, she is mostly confined to acting as Scarborough's sidekick on MSNBC's morning show, which lags in the ratings well behind the major channels as well as its cable rivals, Fox News and CNN.

Hilton and Brzezinski do have something in common, both being blonde, telegenic and the daughters of influential fathers. But any similarity ends there: while Paris is the scion of a wealthy socialite Rick Hilton, the 39-year-old newsreader is the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a foreign policy heavyweight in Washington and a former national security adviser to Jimmy Carter.

In 2001 Brzezinski was working in New York as a correspondent for CBS News, and on September 11 was assigned as the network's "Ground Zero" correspondent. She was broadcasting live on CBS in front of the World Trade Centre when the south tower collapsed.

But suspicions remain that Brzezinski's moment of madness was staged, although the worried reactions from her co-hosts when she attempted to set fire to the script on air suggests she wasn't acting.

Brzezinski's dismissal of Paris Hilton is shared by the majority of Americans.

Al Jazeera -Rewriting the definition of a 'News' Channel

When Osama bin Laden’s spectre loomed large over US all of us waited to get those blurred images of the Taliban or Bin Laden to announce the future intentions of his band of brigands. In the ten years since, all this has changed. Al-Jazeera brings you crisp News from all corners of the Globe, with Newscasts from Washington, London, Doha, Kuala Lumpur and a desk that has the best talent drawn from reputed institutions across the globe.

Any wonder then that watching Al Jazeera’s News is no more a limited vision of the Gulf region, the Muslim world or the channel for developments in the world of Osama and his boys. Interestingly the Al Jazeera News often turned its spotlight on the Asian region, much to the chagrin of the US which has all along wallowed in media glare.

“Under its slogan of “The opinion and the other opinion,” Al-Jazeera gave an Arab world hungry for information and debate the means to talk to itself and shape its future. It spawned imitators across the region and has launched an English channel station that is beginning to challenge the western monopoly of international news as a “voice of the global south”- George Galloway, British MP(The Hindu, June 18, 2007)

We have to remind ourselves that the US decides “What is News?” for us. Therefore they would not be delighted about a recent arrival on the scene altering priorities. Further it has the support of the despotic regimes in the Gulf who would not be too comfortable with the Al-Jazeera kind of journalism.

Neutering that voice must be achieved and what better way than get a pro-US man on the board of the newspaper. Pro-US voices have now found a position on the Board of Directors, what better way could there be to set the agenda for a media house. The US which has held centre-stage as far as ‘Newsmaker’ status is concerned cannot reconcile itself to not featuring among the items in an Al Jazeera newscast which is looking Asia-centric.

Al-Jazeera brings you News in a highly professional manner, and has earned the reputation of being “anti-Us and anti-Arab” which only amply shows how well it holds up the mirror on the region it reports.