Mika Brzezinski

Mika Brzezinski
Born	Mika Emilie Leonia Brzezinski (1967-05-02) May 2, 1967 New York, New York
Status	Married
Education	Williams College, 1989
Occupation	Television journalist
Notable credit	Morning Joe
Title	Co-host: Morning Joe
Spouse	James Patrick Hoffer (October 23, 1993)
Children	2 Children
Relatives	Zbigniew Brzezinski (Father) Emilie Benešová Brzezinski (Mother)

Mika Emilie Leonia Brzezinski (born May 2, 1967) is a television news journalist at MSNBC. Brzezinski is co-host of MSNBC's weekday morning program, Morning Joe. In addition to providing regular commentary, she also reads the news headlines for the program. Additionally she reports for NBC Nightly News, and serves as alternating news anchor on Weekend Today. Previously, she was a CBS News anchor and correspondent.

On December 8, 2008, Brzezinski and Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough began hosting a two-hour late-morning radio show on WABC (770 AM) in New York City.

On July 24, 2009, Brzezinski made remarks regarding the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Gates. Guests, including Harold Ford Jr, were quick to criticise her.

Biography

Early life

Brzezinski was born in New York City, the daughter of foreign policy expert and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and sculptor Emilie Anna Benešová, a grandniece of Czechoslovakia's former president Edvard Beneš. Her father was then teaching at Columbia University, but the family moved to McLean, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., in late 1976, when Zbigniew was named National Security Advisor by newly-elected President Jimmy Carter.

Brzezinski attended The Madeira School during her high-school years. She graduated in 1989 from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she majored in English, after transferring from Georgetown University as a junior. Since 1993, Brzezinski has been married to TV news reporter James Hoffer, now of WABC-TV/WABC-DT. They have two children.

Television news career

Brzezinski began her journalism career as an assistant at ABC's World News This Morning in 1990. A year later, she moved to Tribune-owned FOX affiliate WTIC-TV/WTIC-DT in Hartford, Connecticut. There, she progressed from assignment and features editor to general assignments reporter. In 1992, she joined CBS affiliate WFSB-TV/WFSB-DT (also in Hartford) and quickly progressed through the ranks to become its weekday morning anchor in 1995. In 1997, she left that role to join the CBS network news, where she served as a correspondent and as anchor for the overnight Up to the Minute news program.

In 2000, Brzezinski began a short hiatus from CBS, during which she worked for rival MSNBC on the weekday afternoon show, Home Page, with co-anchors Gina Gaston and Ashleigh Banfield. She returned to CBS as a correspondent in September 2001, which thrust her into the limelight as a principal "Ground Zero" reporter for the September 11, 2001 attacks. Brzezinski was broadcasting live from the scene when the South Tower collapsed. (Coincidentally, her former MSNBC co-anchor, Ashleigh Banfield, was also reporting from Ground Zero for MSNBC.)

In her last position at CBS, Brzezinski served as a CBS News correspondent, substitute anchor, and segment anchor for breaking news segments and routine updates. During this period she was also a frequent contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and "60 Minutes."

Brzezinski returned to MSNBC on January 26, 2007, doing the evening "Up To The Minute" news updates. Since then she has anchored primetime newsbreaks during the week, filling in on MSNBC Live weekdays and on the weekends. Currently, Mika Brzezinski appears daily as a co-host and news reader on MSNBC's morning program, Morning Joe..

Paris Hilton story

On June 26, 2007, near the beginning of Morning Joe, Brzezinski refused to read a report about Paris Hilton's release from jail. One hour later during another news break segment, her producer Andy Jones again pushed the story as the lead, ranking it over Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana's break with President Bush on the Iraq war, which Brzezinski considered more important. After several sarcastic remarks from host Joe Scarborough, she attempted to light the story's script on fire on the air, but in safety of the newsroom, she was physically prevented from doing so by co-host Willie Geist. She then tore up the script, and one hour later, got up and ran another copy of the script through a paper shredder retrieved from Dan Abrams's office. The incident was quickly popularized on the Internet, and in the days that followed Brzezinski received large quantities of fan mail supporting her on-air protest as a commentary on the tension between 'hard news' and 'entertainment news.'

"Supporter for Obama"

On September 16, 2008 on MSNBC's morning program, Morning Joe, John McCain referred to Brzezinski as being "a supporter for Obama" and ribbed her for never visiting McCain's website to research his side of the issues. Reviewing the episode, Brzezinski said:

"I think he was kidding, to an extent. But I think that was bad joke in some ways because it's a little bit hard for a journalist to be made fun of in that way. ... No one has been more defensive about Sarah Palin as a working mother than me and I've taken on my own peers."

More recently, she criticized the way some journalists are infatuated with President Obama and his wife Michelle, stating "I still don’t think it’s right to be in love with him ... and to be acting like a little girl at a Beatles concert.” At the same time, she criticized members of the media elite with trying deliberately to "bring down" Sarah Palin: "Members of the network media elite, as well as members and people who worked for the New York Times when Sarah Palin first came on the scene, and this is what they knew about her: She was a woman, she was pro-life, and she had some very, very conservative views on other issues" ...And all I could hear from my friends in the network media elite was, ‘Let’s bring her down. I hope these rumors bring her down'. . . . They did not know her. They didn’t know anything about her. But they wanted to bring her down.” She has continued her support for Palin even after her resignation saying Palin represented the views of "real Americans."

External links

• Willie Geist interviewed Mika Brzezinski on June 29, 2007 (dubbed by MSNBC "the journalistic shot heard round the world")

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