MSNBC reporter Mika Brzezinski might be cute enough to be confused for eye candy, but she's no lightweight. As a CBS correspondent, she was live at Ground Zero when the south tower collapsed. So maybe it's not surprising that she hit a breaking point on yesterday's "Morning Joe" broadcast when her producer handed her Paris Hilton's release from jail as the lead national news story three hours in a row.

It's easy to mistake this edited clip for one long hissy fit, but if you watch the clock you'll see that Brzezinski first refused to do the story at 6am EST and was handed it anew at 7 -- when she tried to set it on fire -- and again at 8, at which point she carried it over to a shredder and dispatched it, we hope, for good. (She thought she ought to be leading with the day's second story, something about some senator being all mad at the President about some war somewhere where Paris Hilton doesn't live.)

This comes the same week that US Weekly declared a Hilton news blackout, claiming the magazine, like the nation, was deep in the throes of "enormous Paris fatigue." The cover story they went with instead? Suri Cruise.

Now that's journalism.

In what may just be the best screw-up on a national news show ever, yesterday's Today Show inadvertently confirmed that Paris Hilton is indeed what is wrong with America when it accompanied a promo of its "Terror Within" segment with footage of the beleaguered heiress leaving the MTV Movie Awards. The resulting pastiche is truly magically delicious -- particularly when Paris hops into her chaffeured SUV just as Matt Lauer is gravely intoning that the fourth suspect in the JFK airport bombing plot is "still on the run."

One has to wonder if the mistake was not a mistake at all, but merely the brainchild of an overworked, underpaid intern, trapped somewhere in the bowels of Rockefeller Center with nothing but an overdeveloped sense of schadenfreude and an underdeveloped sense of job preservation. Now that's hot.

Last night was an eventful one for Paris Hilton. At about 10pm, she turned herself in at Lynwood County Jail to begin her much-publicized three week stint as a guest of LA County's penal system. But just hours before that, she glammed up and held her head high as a guest at the MTV Movie awards. Good news for host Sarah Silverman, who got deafening cheers from the audience just by mentioning the heiress' upcoming incarceration, and followed that up with a raunchy joke at Paris' expense that brought down the house.

Sprinkled in among the reaction shots from -- the hell? -- Jack Nicholson, there are some good long cuts to Paris herself. She starts off with what is presumably her version of a good natured smile. By mid-point she's working more of a "do I really have to put up with this" expression, and then at the end she forces a small smile again -- but it's the sort of smile that says, "Yeah, I'm smiling. I'm also simultaneously plotting your death and throwing up in my mouth a little." Good times, good times.