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Joanna Weiss has a good piece in today’s Boston Globe on the role played by the Boston-based National Ministry of Design in putting together the set for the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,” which, at long last, debuts at 6:30 p.m. today.

Anyone who’s observed the redesign process for a newspaper can tell you that manic attention to appearances is not unique to TV news. Still, the details Weiss reveals almost make you wonder whether anyone is paying as much attention to the content of the newscast as they are to how it will look.

And as Syracuse University’s ever-quotable Robert Thompson observes, the feminized set that will be unveiled today may not be the smartest idea in the world. “I would think they would want to make this look like good old rough journalism, which Katie is perfectly capable of doing,” Thompson tells Weiss. “They don’t want to make this look like it’s somehow a soft and cuddly evening news.”

Over at the CBS News Web site, it’s all Katie, all the time today. Among the features is an interview Harry Smith did with Couric for the network’s morning show. At one point, Smith notes that some observers have wondered whether Couric can make the leap from the fluffier morning environment even though few asked such questions about Charlie Gibson, who recently made precisely that move at ABC. Couric responds that there is “some residual sexism” in the business, and that “women are judged by different standards.” Moments later, Smith refers to Couric as a “girl,” prompting Couric to laugh and sarcastically reply to the mortified Smith, “Thank you for calling me a girl.”

There’s also a video conversation between Couric and outgoing anchor Bob Schieffer, a blog, a podcast, RSS feeds and more.

The best news is that the video stream is supposed to be on the Web after the news is over. So if I’m not home by 6:30 (Media Nation, sadly, is TiVo-free), I’ll still be able to see it.

I’ve received some excellent advice in response to my post on spam the other day. Anyone who’s dealing with the same issue ought to check out the comments. I thought I’d provide an update for anyone who’s interested. Perhaps this can help you.

First, I had one problem that was easy to solve. I never use my EarthLink account, so 99.9 percent of the e-mail that comes in is spam. I don’t really care about the other 0.1 percent, since anyone who’s trying to contact me via EarthLink ought to know better. So I turned EarthLink’s Web-based spam-filtering system up to the highest level, and went from receiving dozens of spam e-mails per day to none. Mission accomplished.

The next problem was stickier — what to do about my personal account, dan {at} dankennedy {dot} net, which had become hopelessly bogged down through overuse and careless publication on the Web. The company that provides me with POP service has no server-level spam filtering whatsoever. So I started a Gmail account, and then changed the settings on my POP account so that anything sent to my personal address gets forwarded to Gmail.

Finally I established a new account in Entourage X so that it can download e-mail from my Gmail account. I know that using Gmail on the Web is supposed to be wonderful, but I like Entourage and would just as soon stick with what I’m comfortable with — for the time being, anyway.

Every day or every couple of days I’ll visit the Gmail Web site and sift through the spam folder to see whether there’s anything that shouldn’t have been labeled as spam. I’m just hoping that Gmail’s spam filter is as good as people say it is.

So far, my Northeastern e-mail account, which is listed in the right-hand rail of Media Nation, has not attracted a lot of spam, which I attribute to my being more careful with it. But if it gets out of control, I could presumably do the same thing with that, too.

Thank you, one and all.

What is there to say about Jon Lester that hasn’t already been said? Like other observers, I recommend this Dan Shaughnessy column. And best wishes to this young man and his family. Here’s a prediction: Opening Day pitcher, April 2008.

Update: I like Jay Fitzgerald’s thoughts on the ethical dilemma over whether to report on serious medical matters before there’s an official announcement. No, I don’t know where the line is, either.

David Johnston’s article in today’s New York Times underscores the unfairness of Times columnist David Brooks’ attack (sub. req.) on former State Department official Richard Armitage earlier in the week. Of course, unfairness is an opinionmonger’s stock in trade, and I have no quarrel with that. The problem is that the specific nature of Brooks’ criticism is based on an untruth, and Brooks knew it when he wrote it.

Not to get bogged down in the impenetrable Valerie Plame Wilson leak case — a matter in which there are truly no good guys, including Wilson’s husband, the self-aggrandizing former ambassador Joseph Wilson — but last week we learned that it was Armitage who’d tipped off columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Wilson was a CIA operative.

Novak’s July 2003 column revealing that fact has been cited by many (including me) as evidence that the White House may have been seeking political retribution against Joseph Wilson, who’d become a critic of the case for the war in Iraq following his mission to Niger to learn whether Saddam Hussein had sought uranium. (Wilson said Saddam hadn’t, but the evidence suggests that Wilson had actually found otherwise. But never mind.)

What’s significant about the Armitage revelation — reported in Newsweek by staffer Michael Isikoff, and fleshed out in a forthcoming book by Isikoff and the Nation’s David Corn — is that Armitage was a relative liberal in the Bush administration, an aide to and friend of Colin Powell who apparently held Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, et al. in contempt. Armitage would be the last person to engage in a political dirty trick on behalf of the Bushies. He shouldn’t have outed Valerie Wilson, but he certainly didn’t do it to punish her husband.

Anyway, to get back to Brooks. In his rambling indictment of Armitage and the political and media culture that Brooks sees as protecting him, he wrote sarcastically:

Richard Armitage, as is often made clear, is the very emblem of martial virtue. Unlike the pencil-necked chicken hawks that used to bedevil him, he had his character forged in the heat of battle, amid the whir of bullets. And what he apparently learned is that if you keep quiet while your comrades are being put through the ringer, then you will come out fine in the end. Armitage did keep quiet as the frenzy boiled, and he will come out fine.

This is brutal stuff. What Brooks is saying is that Armitage kept his mouth shut while Libby faces prison and Rove was nearly ruined by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. But it’s also completely untrue. Among the research materials that Brooks had available was the Newsweek article, which contains this:

Armitage’s admission [initially to Powell, his boss] led to a flurry of anxious phone calls and meetings that day at the State Department…. Within hours, William Howard Taft IV, the State Department’s legal adviser, notified a senior Justice official that Armitage had information relevant to the case. The next day, a team of FBI agents and Justice prosecutors investigating the leak questioned the deputy secretary. Armitage acknowledged that he had passed along to Novak information contained in a classified State Department memo: that Wilson’s wife worked on weapons-of-mass-destruction issues at the CIA. (The memo made no reference to her undercover status.) Armitage had met with Novak in his State Department office on July 8, 2003 — just days before Novak published his first piece identifying Plame. Powell, Armitage and Taft, the only three officials at the State Department who knew the story, never breathed a word of it publicly and Armitage’s role remained secret.

But oh, you say, Armitage and his buddies “never breathed a word of it publicly.” Doesn’t that support Brooks’ thesis? Hardly. Remaining silent after having been questioned by “a team of FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors” suggests that silence was something investigators were insisting on. And, sure enough, we come to today’s Times article by Johnston, in which we learn:

Mr. Armitage cooperated voluntarily in the case, never hired a lawyer and testified several times to the grand jury, according to people who are familiar with his role and actions in the case. He turned over his calendars, datebooks and even his wife’s computer in the course of the inquiry, those associates said. But Mr. Armitage kept his actions secret, not even telling President Bush because the prosecutor asked him not to divulge it, the people said.

Will Brooks write a retraction? Will he apologize? Will Byron Calame look into this?

Columnists have wide latitude, but they are journalists, too. They have no right to unmoor themselves from the facts. Brooks accused Armitage of being the worst kind of moral coward — something he should have known was untrue from reading the original Newsweek article, and which is even more clear today. Brooks shouldn’t be allowed just to slide by.

Media Nation despairs of anyone actually reading this item on the eve of a holiday weekend, but I needed to do some research at the newsstand before writing this. Which is where I am right now.

Today the Boston Herald’s Inside Track tweaks Boston Magazine as “rather tired” and “increasingly irrelevant.” Tracksters Gayle Fee and Laura Raposa report that Boston Common magazine succeeded in getting some celebrity named Bridget Moynahan (no, I really don’t know who she is; sorry) to pose for the cover after Moynahan had previously spurned BoMag’s advances. Fee and Raposa refer to Boston Common as a “fab upstart” and write: “The Moynahan photos and interview are a coup for Boston Common, which has been fighting a turf battle for upscale readers with the older and increasingly irrelevant Boston maggie.”

What Fee and Raposa don’t say is that (1) they are contributors to Boston Common, and have a feature about celebs on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard in the current issue; and (2) they were recently the subject of a tough piece by Boston Magazine’s John Gonzalez that portrayed the Tracksters as more interested in dish than facts.

But wait. Shouldn’t BoMag have mentioned that Fee and Raposa were taking freelance checks from its archrival, Boston Common? Why, yes it should have, since that would have allowed readers to assess motive. Do two non-disclosures cancel each other out? No, they don’t.

And now, my disclosure: I’m quoted in Gonzalez’s article, though not directly on the Tracksters. Far be it from me to want to piss them off.

Maria Lopez, the only judge in history to yell at a lawyer (that’s a joke, son), is profiled in the forthcoming issue of Massachsuetts Lawyers Weekly. Her “Judge Judy”-style show, “Judge Maria Lopez,” will make its debut on Sept. 11.

Lopez tells reporter David Frank: “I used to have some regrets about what had happened until this television opportunity came along. I used to say I regretted having lost my temper, but I don’t anymore because it was that loss of temper that has gotten me to where I am today. It’s the irony of it all.”

Here is the article I wrote about Lopez’s travails six years ago, when I was working for her husband. I think it stands up pretty well. And I hope her show’s a success.

I’m not sure why, but the ratio of spam to legitimate e-mails has tilted into the insane zone in the past couple of weeks. I’m trying SpamSieve, but I’m dubious: I still have to sit in front of my iBook and watch all that worthless e-mail come in; and then I still have to look at everything to make sure that the program didn’t improperly label a good e-mail as spam. How does that help?

Are any of you using a spam-blocker that you actually like? It seems to me that a server-based solution would be best. I’m also intrigued by those occasional messages I receive from people saying that my e-mail won’t go through unless I take an additional step. I realize it’s a burden to people trying to reach me, but this is getting ridiculous.

I had missed Dan Golden’s article (sub. req.) in the Wall Street Journal on diversity quotas in textbooks, so I’m glad that Jeff Jacoby decided to write about it today in the Boston Globe.

Golden — and Jacoby — devote a considerable amount of space to requirements that photos of children from various ethnic and racial groups be included. But I want to focus on rules that kids with disabilities be depicted — and that, incredibly, publishers often get around this by photographing able-bodied children in wheelchairs. Golden writes:

Thomas Hehir, a Harvard professor of education and former director of special education at the U.S. Department of Education, says the able-bodied models in wheelchairs don’t resemble most disabled children, who have conditions such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy that “affect their appearance in other ways. I look at the pictures in the textbooks and I say, ‘This doesn’t look like a kid I know. How did this kid become disabled?'”

[Company spokesman Collin] Earnst says Houghton Mifflin enlists able-bodied models for the disabled only as a last resort, and “makes a very strong effort” to photograph disabled children. It has “done casting” at Children’s Hospital in Boston, and featured a Down syndrome child in one textbook, he says. But he says it is “challenging” and “expensive” to find disabled models, because there are few talent agencies for them.

Laura Rakauskas, whose son has modeled for textbooks, said she attended a photo shoot for a Houghton math book where organizers sought a girl to pose in a wheelchair. She said several mothers refused on their children’s behalf before a volunteer came forward. She says she wasn’t troubled because seeing able-bodied children in a wheelchair is a “gentle introduction” to disability for students who haven’t encountered it.

I’m sorry, but this is pandering — benign pandering, but pandering nevertheless. In fact, any child who attends a decent-size school is likely to encounter fellow students with real disabilities. They don’t need a “gentle introduction.” Including kids with disabilities in textbooks is potentially a good thing, but not if it’s used to promote unrealistic ideas of what disability is about. If anything, it could help lead to unfair expectations about what disabled kids ought to be able to do.

One of my daughter’s classmates, for instance, has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a progressive, often fatal disorder. Over the years Nick has gone from walking to using a wheelchair. He has a service dog with him in school. It’s a terrible situation for him and his family, of course, but it’s been a valuable — and real — lesson for his fellow students.

When I was growing up, one of our classmates, Terri, was in a wheelchair because of cerebral palsy. Terri was a smart kid who participated in activities as best as she could. But as Golden and Jacoby observe, no one would confuse her with one of the able-bodied kids that textbook publishers put in wheelchairs to fill their quotas.

Golden and Jacoby invoke “political correctness” to explain the dysfunction at work in the textbook diversity campaign. Well, I guess. But I’d say that cynicism is a more apt description. For instance, check out this bit from Golden:

“Make sure physically challenged people are visible enough to comply with state requirements” and “appear on right-hand pages for a ‘thumb test,'” McGraw-Hill 2004 guidelines advise. Translation: Time-pressed state officials sometimes use their thumbs to flip through the pages speedily looking for images of minorities or the disabled. Generally, this results in examining only the right-hand pages.

Yes, parents, this is how your children’s textbooks are being chosen. Gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it?

Update: Jay Fitzgerald doesn’t think this is a big deal. “Don’t you kind of assume that most people assume all the photos are staged?” he asks. But Jay — isn’t it offensive when disabled kids, already somewhat excluded from the culture, are shunted aside so that more “normal”-looking able-bodied children are put in wheelchairs — and the purpose is to fill a diversity quota?

Media Nation is not going to link to every example of media handwringing that’s online following the decision by Colorado authorities to drop the case against John Karr in the JonBenet Ramsey murder.

But here are two, just to give you a flavor.

Howard Kurtz begins his washingtonpost.com blog today with this:

Will every anchor, correspondent and producer who shamelessly hyped the John Mark Karr story now apologize for taking the country for a ride?

Don’t hold your breath.

This was such a sham, from the opening moments, that it instantly goes down with the greatest media embarrassments in modern history.

And, over at the Huffington Post, Bob Geiger writes:

There should be a lot of very red faces in newsrooms all over the United States right about now — there should be, but I doubt there will be….

What is amazing to me is the media circus that has followed this “case” for almost two weeks now without really a shred of proof that anything had truly developed in the 10-year-old mystery.

I’m not going to defend the media’s endless coverage of a private, decade-old tragedy. For more on that, I recommend this Boston Phoenix editorial as well as Scot Lehigh’s column in the Boston Globe last Friday. As the invaluable Andrew Tyndall notes, even the three nightly network newscasts, supposedly a bastion of sobriety compared to the morning shows and the wretched cable stations, wallowed in JonBenetmania.

But I do think one small corrective is in order. The media did not arrest Karr in Thailand and fly him back to the United States. The media did not wine and dine Karr while airborne in an attempt to get him to talk. The media did not publicly state that Karr was the killer.

It was law-enforcement officials in Colorado who did all that, and it is they who bear most of the blame for this fiasco.

And I would note that most responsible media accounts have made it clear from the first or second day that the case against Karr was shaky at best.

Yes the quantity of coverage has been ludicrous. But the quality? Not so bad.

Is anyone blaming Terry Francona for the Red Sox’ collapse? I didn’t think so. Nick Cafardo this morning tells us not to blame Francona. OK, Nick. We won’t.

And best wishes to David Ortiz.