It’s easy to see Mika Brzezinski as eye candy on a minority station called MSNBC somewhere in the States but what she tried to do the other day live on air is symptomatic of a much larger debate going on within the media in the United States and one, perhaps, that we need to start in the UK.

Brzezinski’s name isn’t known here but she has impressive history as a “proper” journalist having worked for ABC and CBS, finding fame as the principle correspondent at Ground Zero when she was broadcasting from the scene when the south tower collapsed.

Now, live on air, she has refused to lead the news with yet more coverage of Paris Hilton which overshadowed the revelation that Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana had rebelled against President Bush on the Iraq war. Lugar, who had been seen as, “a reliable vote for President Bush on the war,” surprisingly turned against Bush saying that, “Bush’s Iraq strategy was not working and that the U.S. should downsize the military’s role”.

If you watch the clip (below) it could be interpreted as just a hissy fit from one woman but on closer inspection it’s clear that she tried three times on the hour from 06:00 am to stop this item leading the news.

This comes close on the heels of the magazine US Weekly imposing a ban on mentioning the celebrity.

Last year Time magazine’s London Bureau chief Jef McAllister said in his Poynter Fellowship Lecture “Running the World Without Really Trying: The Decline of Foreign News in America and Why It Is Dangerous.” that :

“When you’re rich and powerful — rich and powerful enough to be, in a way, the center of your universe — it’s hard to stay attuned to the threats that may be emerging at the far corners of your domain.”

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Questioning why the American news networks turned inwards McAllister asserts :

“A combination of geo-strategic luck and market forces. Of course, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the instinctive notion that survival depended upon knowing about foreign countries in a dangerous world faded.”

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adding that networks were :

“all taken over by big conglomerates which started taking a look at their news divisions” in relation to how they “contribute to the [network’s] bottom line.”

“In December, just two months ago, more than 40% in a survey said the United States should ‘mind its own business internationally,’ which is the highest level of isolationist sentiment since the Vietnam War, I hope it does not take further suffering, more Sept. 11ths, to get our boiler lit, to realize that we cannot any longer ‘just mind our own business internationally’ or tune out the world. But I fear it might be the case.”

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For that reason alone American needs to stop focusing on itself and on minor celebrities. We all need more Brzezinski’s who question and remind us that what is happening in the world is much more important to us all than the life of one twenty-six year old girl.