From journalism.org:

It was shortly after one p.m. eastern time on Friday June 8 when cable viewers witnessed a scene that was part paparazzi, part “Cops,” and part “Entertainment Tonight.”

A handcuffed Paris Hilton was deposited into sheriff’s car #865 for a trip back to court where Judge Michael Sauer would send her back to jail after her sudden and early release the day before. The spectacle of cameras trained on the car winding its way slowly through the Los Angeles streets was, in a way, strangely reminiscent of O.J. Simpson’s slow-speed car chase 13 years earlier.

Hilton managed to evade the waiting press hordes on her return to the courthouse, but that did not chill their ardor. “The media frenzy is wild,” declared CNN’s entertainment correspondent Sibila Vargas.

Paris Hilton’s problems represented only the second celebrity tabloid tale this year—the first being Anna Nicole Smith’s death—to make the roster of top five stories, according to PEJ’s News Coverage Index from June 3-8. The saga of socialite/party girl Hilton’s release and return to prison after serving a few days of what had been a 23-day sentence for violating drunk driving probation was the fifth biggest story of the week, filling 4% of the newshole.

The Hilton tale was covered most heavily in cable (third biggest story at 9%) and on radio (fourth story at 7%). And the bulk of the attention came late in the week. For the two days of June 7 and 8, Hilton generated 10% of the overall coverage, filling 18% of the radio and 21% of the cable airtime.

Cable’s attraction to the story was clearly illustrated by MSNBC on June 8. Declaring “here’s Paris Hilton now,” anchor Contessa Brewer abruptly cut away from a discussion of the retirement of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace to the scene at Hilton’s home as she prepared for her ride back to court.

Jon Stewart addressed this Monday night on The Daily Show.

Last Thursday, he had this bit:

"You know, a lotta people may be wondering, 'What are they gonna do about that Paris Hilton thing? They gonna cover that Paris Hilton thing?' No, we're not gonna cover that Paris Hilton thing. Although we did discuss if we had covered it, what might be the possible, shall we say, over-the-shoulder pun in which we would perhaps poke subtle fun at the heiress.

"So just to let you know while we will not be covering this issue, if you at home happen to have your own news program that you run out of your house, you might want to go with Shawskank Redemption."

It might be time to remind ourselves of the Great AP Experiment.

From the AP story on MSNBC:

A sports reporter was ejected from an NCAA baseball tournament game for submitting live Internet reports during play.

Brian Bennett, a writer for The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal, was approached Sunday by an NCAA representative in the bottom of the fifth inning and told that blogging from an NCAA championship event is against NCAA policies, the newspaper said.

Bennett had done live blogging during Louisville's super-regional baseball games against Oklahoma State in the previous two games of the three-game series. The representative revoked Bennett's credential Sunday and asked him to leave the game.

The newspaper's executive editor, Bennie Ivory, called the dispute a First Amendment issue.

"This is part of the evolution of how we present the news to our readers," Ivory said. "It's what we did during the Orange Bowl. It's what we did during the NCAA basketball tournament. It's what we do." ...

The newspaper said the university circulated a memo on the issue from Jeramy Michiaels, the NCAA's manager of broadcasting, before the first super-regional game on Friday. It said blogs are considered a "live representation of the game" and blogs containing action photos or game reports are prohibited until the game is over.

David Akin posts on his blog that Toronto Star media critic Antonia Zerbisias will be moving on from her media critic's gig to some other as-yet-unnamed gig within the Star.

Apparently she broke the news via Facebook.

No word at this point if the Star will fill the media critic's gig.

In Akin's post, Zerby mentioned she's been lobbying for her new gig since 2003. Her blog essentially died in late August. I don't know exactly how long she's been doing the media gig for, but I suspect for a while (Wikipedia says she started as a media reporter at the Star in 1993 and became a columnist in 2003).

I don't agree with everything she's written, but in the few times we've spoken over the years, we've both ended up giggling, which isn't a bad thing. :)

From the AP story on Yahoo! News:

On a winter day when bomb blasts at an Iraqi university killed dozens and the United Nations estimated that 34,000 civilians in Iraq had died in 2006, MSNBC spent nearly nine minutes on the stories during the 1 p.m. hour. A CNN correspondent in Iraq did a three-minute report about the bombings.

Neither story merited a mention on Fox News Channel that hour.

That wasn't unusual. Fox spent half as much time covering the Iraq war than MSNBC during the first three months of the year, and considerably less than CNN, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The difference was more stark during daytime news hours than in prime-time opinion shows. The Iraq war occupied 20 percent of CNN's daytime news hole and 18 percent of MSNBC's. On Fox, the war was talked about only 6 percent of the time.

The independent think tank's report freshens a debate over whether ideology drives news agendas, and it comes at a delicate time for Fox. Top Democratic presidential candidates have refused to appear at debates sponsored by Fox. Liberals find attacking Fox is a way to fire up their base. ...

So with less on-air attention being paid to Iraq during the first few months of the year, what filled the void for Fox? PEJ's report said the network gave the death of Anna Nicole Smith significantly more air time than its rivals.

Here's the PEJ report on cable news.

And here's the home page of the PEJ News Coverage Index.

Frank D'Angelo, the guy who brought us the "Do you Cheetah?" commercial with horse racer Ben Johnson, has sued an Ottawa blogger.