For people working in the news business, it seems there is no escape from celebrity stories. Whether they like it or not, they are stuck with them and if anyone of them dares to complain, the stock answer is: “This is what people want”, or “that’s what sells.” And with this logic, readers are fed a diet of Madonna, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, to mention the most covered ones in the news.

However, one TV anchor, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski last week broke the rule and decided not to report an earth-shattering piece about heiress Paris Hilton giving her first interview after being released from jail. I very much doubt that there are still people who don’t know who Paris Hilton is or heard of her or saw her picture. After all you cannot escape either the latest news about her or her pictures because they are in the news bulletins of major networks, from CNN to the smallest satellite channel.

To go back to Brzezinski, she refused to read the news about Paris. In fact she got angry and tried to burn the script and when her producer replaced it, she put it in the shredder saying, “I hate it and I don’t think it should be our lead.”

The Brzezinski moment was posted on YouTube website and was viewed over 250,000 times that day. Somehow, Brzezinski touched a button and the people who had been subjected to a flood of news about celebrities found a place to express their opinions while others saw a new celebrity. “I have a new hero and her name is Mika Brzezinski,” the Guardian paper quoted one blogger as saying.

Another reader on the BBC website said, “It is about time someone in the TV news media showed some sense. You could watch the news all day in the States and never know there was a war on at all.”

Answering a teasing remark from one of her colleagues, “You have changed the world Mika Brzezinski,” the MSNBC anchor said, “at least my world.”

Now there is a difference between reporting the news of famous people, which is admittedly a good read, and overdoing that and actually turning it into an obsession.

The Paris Hilton story summarizes a situation that is becoming unbearable to many people. And it says so much about the power of the media; it can make a story out of nothing and can bombard people with virtually anything. People were listening to the news about Paris Hilton on a daily basis, her pictures were all over the TV screens and a whole drama was created because someone was jailed for drunk driving.

Some people might say that this sort of saturated coverage of celebrities, real and fake, is limited to the Western media. It is not; local Saudi papers too devoted much space to Hilton’s news. And to be fair, we have our own Paris Hiltons whom we keep in the spotlight all the time. The other day in a conversation with some colleagues, one of them — an Iraqi who fled his country to escape Saddam’s reign — asked me, “Who is Haifa?”

I stood there thinking about my friend’s child who heard about the bombing of Haifa during the Lebanon war and asked her mother innocently, “Why are they bombing Haifa, what did she do to them?” Of course my friend’s daughter was talking about the Lebanese singer Haifa Wahbi and not the city. Anyway, I told my college who Haifa was, and he still did not seem to grasp it. He said, “That’s what I thought too, but I was shocked yesterday to see an Arabic news channel reporting the news that Haifa had a minor accident; why is that important?”

I realized then that his inquiry about Haifa was sarcastic. He went on: “I just don’t get it, that is not an item that gets reported in a news bulletin. We have wars going on and people are dying every hour of the day.”

I could not think of an answer to his remark except to say that “they’ll always have Paris and we’ll always have Haifa.”