TORONTO - At long last, celebutante Paris Hilton might have jumped the shark.
The mainstream media has apparently had enough after years of begrudgingly covering the many exploits of a wealthy 26-year-old socialite who became famous simply for partying and taking part in a night-vision sex tape.
"I hate this story and I don't think it should be our lead,'' a visibly miffed MSNBC news anchor, Mika Brzezinski, griped to both her viewers and her co-hosts after reading an item about Hilton's release.
She apologized to the audience for leading with the story, saying it wasn't her idea, and then proceeded to attempt to light the Paris Hilton script on fire before finally putting it through a shredder. A video of her on-air meltdown can be found on YouTube.com by searching on Brzezinski's name.
But she hasn't been alone in her frustration in recent days. As Fox News reporter Jonathan Hunt covered a jubilant Hilton's release from a Los Angeles jail early Tuesday, he said her parents "might want to question'' the way they've raised their daughter while criticizing the heiress for apparently planning a boozy party to celebrate her freedom.
Hilton was in jail, after all, for violating her probation on an alcohol-related driving charge, he pointed out. Hunt was overwhelmingly applauded for his stance by commenters on the TMZ.com website.
The Hilton backlash seems familiar to Jeff Jarvis, a former People magazine reporter who's now a part-time Web consultant and the author of the BuzzMachine blog (www.buzzmachine.com).
"We overdose on every fad,'' he said in a telephone interview from New York. "We overdosed on Michael Jackson, we overdosed on Lindsay Lohan, we overdosed on Anna Nicole Smith -- and that's good. Excess creates its own break.''
Because Hilton remains such a draw, Jarvis says, major news networks and newspapers have been forced to report the story with the same breathless intensity as entertainment blogs, celebrity weeklies and infotainment shows.
Hilton boosts ratings, attracts readers and lures surfers to websites, he says. That might explain why CNN was eager to step in to interview Hilton on Wednesday night after NBC and ABC dropped their plans amid an outcry about paying the well-heeled heiress for the chat. CNN didn't pay for their Hilton interview.
"I've consulted for websites that live and die by search engine optimization, and the well-known, cheapest trick there is to get higher on Google is to somewhere include the words `Paris Hilton' on your web page,'' Jarvis said. "You'll get more traffic, and that is still the case.''
"And now that we have the Internet and blogs, mainstream media thinks that we care about things a lot more than we care about them, and so it attempts to cover those stories in much the same way.''
Paris Hilton antipathy has been brewing for quite some time among established journalists, however.
NBC's Brian Williams, CNN's Anderson Cooper and the New York Daily News's Lloyd Grove have made attempts over the years to avoid mentioning her. Grove, in fact, was successful in not writing a word about Hilton for two years until his column was discontinued, though Williams and Cooper had their hands forced by her recent tangles with the law.
The Associated Press also conducted a weeklong experiment earlier this year that involved not reporting on Hilton, and said that not a single client ever complained.
This time around, however, even Us Weekly's Janice Min -- whose bread and butter is celebrities like Hilton -- says the bleached-blond party girl has passed her best-before date, pledging not to have a single word about her in the next issue hitting newsstands on Friday.
Of course, People magazine was the successful bidder for Hilton's first post-jail magazine interview, so it could be sour grapes at work.
Robert Thompson, pop culture professor at Syracuse University, says Hilton seems to have hit a nerve with the public. The notion of respected networks bidding to get the first post-jail interview with Hilton angered people -- including reporters.
"Most journalists, from the get-go, are embarrassed by this. They went into the field usually with noble aspirations, they went to journalism school, they read Edward R. Murrow and then they find themselves on the Paris bandwagon,'' he said.
Media conglomerates would be wise to heed their journalists and spend some time reflecting in the aftermath of the Hilton journalistic orgy.
"This is really an interesting situation, however, because people are interested. We are all co-conspirators in this whole thing. And we have a press and a journalistic establishment that is mostly supported by advertising dollars so they have to jump on the bandwagon,'' he said.
"The question is, though, how much do they feed this appetite? They know it's out there but at one point, they have to try to come to terms with the balance of the professional job that they've got to do and the fact that they have to keep delivering audience.''
