Sack Kay Burley: top Twitter trend

There were two interesting and interconnected trends on Twitter today. One, #dontdoitnick, doesn't need much explanation. The only observation I would make is that a person who sits not very far from me in the Guardian office is claiming credit for inventing it on Friday. Mind you, she also gerrymandered the office election sweepstake: her insistence that we designate speaker John Bercow as a Conservative handed her victory.

The other trending topic – top of the UK list as I write – is Sack Kay Burley. What heinous crime can the Sky News presenter have committed, I hear you cry? Well, as she was broadcasting live today, a noisy protest march (urging the Lib Dems not to sell out to the Tories on proportional representation) made its way past the Sky News broadcasting position on College Green, London.

It prompted Burley to say, on air: "Lots of demonstrators shouting 'fair votes now' – not sure what they mean by that." Was that political commentary from a news organisation supposedly bound by Ofcom's impartiality rules? Surely not.

But that wasn't the main complaint. Her interview with one of the protest's organisers, David Babbs of 38 Degrees, was also seen as unnecessarily confrontational. It's worth a watch on YouTube – by the end of it, she's shrieking at Babbs, barely letting him get a word out. It's quite an extraordinary piece of television. Paxman, it ain't.

Later, she was heckled by a protester who chanted: "Sack Kay Burley. Watch the BBC. Sky News is shit." You can see the that one on YouTube too.

Burley, ever the pro, responded at first with that glinting smile of hers: "Democracy in action right behind me." Many newsreaders have that annoying habit of declaiming sentences without verbs – but Burley has it particularly bad. She can go for hours without the slightest hint of a doing word.

But the man got more angry and began shouting anti-Murdoch slogans. Burley, who hurriedly cut to a commercial break, said: "They don't like The Sun, they don't like us, they don't like Rupert." No, they certainly don't.