I’m going to get this out of the way right off the bat: I’ve been watching this season of Celebrity Apprentice. I know, it’s lame and I’m not very proud of it. But it was worth outing myself to talk about MSNBC’s lame attempt at covering “Entertainment News.”

First, when I read the entertainment section of a website I expect to read about who died, who OD’d or who’s sleeping with whom. I don’t, under any circumstances, want to be reading spoilers about your own network’s TV shows. I mean, really?

Think about it this way – if I care even the slightest bit about a television program, I either watched it when it aired or I’ve DVR’d it. If I’ve watched it, then I obviously don’t need your play by play of what happened. If I’ve DVR’d it and you spilled the beans on the show, well, now you’ve just pissed me off. That’s exactly what happened this morning with the Apprentice. I woke to the headline of “*** Gets the Boot on Apprentice.” Notice how I blanked out the name? That’s because, unlike MSNBC, I care enough about my readers to not spoil TV shows for you.

Now, I realize that some of you are saying “but Scott, if you DVR’d the show NBC doesn’t really care if you watch it later or not since you’ll forward through the commercials and that’s all they really care about.” Ahhh yes, good point astute reader, but if you’ve ever watched an episode of the Apprentice you know that each episode is basically a commercial in and of itself. Trump and Mark Burnett have been geniuses in integrating brands into the challenges and tasks on the show for years. So while, yes, I may skip the commercials, what about the company that ponied up big bucks for a giant two-hour spot? Ask Kodak, Lifelock or Norton if they’d be pissed about that.

And let’s be clear here, it’s not just Apprentice using integrated sponsorship in programs. Show likes FX’s “Damages” and Fox’s “24″ have been using American car brands front and center for years. Like it or not, this is the new reality of television advertising and when you print spoilers hours after a show airs, you’re screwing the pooch on your ad sales.

Finally, let’s talk about my real beef with all of this “coverage.” It’s lazy, lazy lazy. How can you watch a TV show on your own network, write a four paragraph rundown of the episode (complete with spoilers) and call yourself a journalist? Where’s the analysis of why *** was fired? Where’s the gripping piece about the rise and fall in ratings of The Apprentice? Why did NBC decide to make this season’s Apprentice run a two-hour weekly program instead of the usual one hour? Journalism should be about covering a real event – politics, sports, human interest etc – not shortening the transcript of a show into four paragraphs.

I don’t know what’s more lame – the fact that I actually watch the Apprentice or that MSNBC thinks that this even remotely qualifies as insightful news.