The editorial office of the Associate Press decided on February 19 not to run any stories on Paris Hilton for one week. As it turns out, not one of the tens of thousands of media outlets depending on AP ever requested a Paris Hilton story. AP says the ban was done as an experiment, and not simply based on the view that public attention ought to be directed towards the war instead.

Unfortunately, right after the ban ended, AP was having serious withdrawals and promptly reported that Paris was ticketed for driving with a suspended license. It’s just too bad they couldn’t give up their favorite vice for the entire 40 days of lent.

The experiment began on Feb. 19. A few days before, the AP had written from Austria about Hilton’s appearance at the Vienna Opera ball, just ahead of her 26th birthday. We didn’t cover her weekend birthday bash in Las Vegas.

During “blackout week,” the AP didn’t mention Hilton’s second birthday party at a Beverly Hills restaurant, at which a drunken friend reportedly was ejected by security after insulting Paula Abdul and Courtney Love. And editors asked our Puerto Rico bureau not to write about her visit there to hawk her fragrance. However, her name did slip into copy unintentionally three times, as background: in stories about Britney Spears, Nicole Richie, and even in the lead of a story about Democrats in Las Vegas.

Then Hilton was arrested on Feb. 27 for driving with a suspended license — an offense that could conceivably lead to jail time because she may have violated conditions of a previous sentence. By that time, our blackout was over anyway, so reporting the development was an easy call…

… Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, decries the “one-size-fits-all disease” afflicting media outlets, who feel that “everybody’s covering it, so we must, too.” Even The New York Times, he noted, had substantial coverage of a hearing concerning where Anna Nicole Smith — perhaps the one person who rivaled Hilton in terms of fame for fame’s sake — would be buried. “That disease leads to the Paris Hilton virus spreading through the news industry,” says Jarvis, who puts out the BuzzMachine blog.

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