The Colombian primary

My old Boston Phoenix colleague Al Giordano reports in the Narco News Bulletin that Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe, a right-wing despot with a deplorable human-rights record, is deeply worried about the possibility that Barack Obama will become president. Giordano writes:

[T]he Clinton organization has a long history of backing — politically and economically — the Colombian far right, its narco-politicians and paramilitary death squads, of whom Uribe is supreme leader. In 2000, then-US president Bill Clinton went on Colombian national TV to announce “Plan Colombia,” the multi-billion dollar US military intervention that keeps Uribe and his repressive regime in power to this day.

According to Giordano’s report, Uribe’s human-rights record is so bad that it recently attracted the attention of Human Rights Watch and a number of other religious and humanitarian organizations. Last year, Giordano notes, Al Gore decided not to attend an environmental meeting in Miami because he didn’t want to share the stage with Uribe, who has been linked to right-wing death squads.

The Clintons, on the other hand, have continued to be ardent supporters of Uribe, with the former president accepting an award from the Colombian government last year.

The Uribe matter has made it into the mainstream media, with the Associated Press running a story on Thursday. But the AP emphasizes Uribe’s displeasure over Obama’s opposition to a U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement — never mentioning, as Giordano observes, that Hillary Clinton has said she opposes the agreement as well.

This is an important story that almost certainly won’t get the attention it deserves.

More: Ben Smith of the Politico reports that the Colombian government no longer requires the services of Clinton strategist Mark Penn.

Saturday morning roundup

If I were Ernie Roberts, the great Globe sports columnist, I’d tell you what I had for breakfast this Saturday morning. I’m not, so herewith a few observations about this and that.

Deval Patrick’s corporate benefactors. The drip-drip-drip over Gov. Patrick’s book proposal has been more a source of amusement than a cause for genuine concern. Today’s Globe story, in which we learn that he takes credit for the 10,000 people who turned out for a Barack Obama rally on the Common, is a hoot.

But yesterday’s Globe story properly noted a real problem — Patrick’s reliance on corporations, some of which will have business before the state, to buy books by the truckload in order to hand out to employees and clients. The impression you get is of a governor so convinced of his own rectitude that he believes he’s above the rules mere mortals have to follow.

Judge Murphy’s future on the bench. A Globe editorial today urges the state Supreme Judicial Court to suspend Judge Ernest Murphy, who was may be fined earlier this week for his bizarre and threatening letters to Herald publisher Pat Purcell after Murphy won a $2.1 million libel case against the Herald. [Correction: The Commission on Judicial Conduct has recommended that Murphy be censured, suspended for 30 days and fined $25,000.]

I assume the Globe means without pay. As a Herald editorial noted on Wednesday, Murphy has been out on paid leave since sometime last year, collecting his salary of nearly $130,000. It’s hard to think of a public official who has profited so handsomely from media criticism of his performance — which, no matter how imperfectly it may have been executed, is supposed to receive the highest possible protection from the First Amendment.

Helping the fans by gouging them. The Herald goes B-I-G today with the fact that the Red Sox are auctioning off Green Monster tickets to the highest bidder, with some seats going for more than $500.

The best quote is from Ron Bumgarner, the Sox’ vice president of ticketing: “We feel it’s our civic responsibility to keep tickets affordable for fans, and at the end of the day, this helps keep other ticket prices down.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Newspaper-killing chain faces death. The Journal Register Co., known within the business as the cheapest chain on earth, is sinking in a sea of debt and is in danger of being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. The Journal Register’s best-known paper is the New Haven Register, but it also used to own the Taunton Gazette and the Fall River Herald News, now held by GateHouse Media. It also used to own the Woonsocket Call, where I was a co-op student in the mid-1970s.

Cape Cod Today publisher Walter Brooks sent out a blast e-mail with the news, which he titled “Every tear remained unjerked in its little ducts.” No kidding.

Repairing the Web’s broken meter

There is no bigger issue facing the news business today than how to make the Web pay. And there is no bigger obstacle to solving that problem than figuring out how many people are visiting, how long they’re sticking around and the like.

As I found out last year when I was reporting a story on young news consumers for CommonWealth Magazine, the internal numbers compiled by Web sites like Boston.com and BostonHerald.com can be as much as three times higher than the numbers reported by Nielsen/NetRatings, the source of the leading apples-to-apples statistics used by advertisers.

The dilemma: Nielsen says it’s more accurate to ask people which sites they’ve visited than to look at a given site’s statistics, because an enormous percentage of those statistics are based on automated hits from search engines. News-business folks respond that Nielsen greatly undercounts the number of people who log on from work and from overseas.

Now, according to this article by David Cohn in the Columbia Journalism Review, help may be on the way. The Media Rating Council, a nonprofit group that helped standardize television and radio ratings nearly 50 years ago, has turned its attention to the Internet in an attempt to figure out all the metrics that should be of value to advertisers: how many people, how many different people, how many pages they’re calling up and how much time they’re spending with a given site.

These problems are far more difficult to solve than you might imagine. As Cohn points out, increasing numbers of privacy-minded people are setting their browsers to eliminate cookies every time they quit. The result: they’ll be counted as “unique users,” rather than return users, whenever they visit a particular Web site.

And if someone leaves a Web page on her screen while she goes on a 10-mile bike ride, how is that supposed to be measured?

The news business thrived on the lack of knowledge over whether any given subscriber would pore through the paper that day or toss it in the recycling bin unopened. Online, advertisers demand to know a lot more than that. So far, it’s proved impossible to answer their questions. Maybe that will change soon.

The Bailey Cosmo-logy

Cosmo Macero Jr., the only journalist I’m aware of who managed to compete with Steve Bailey and not look completely foolish, blogs a tribute to the now-former Globe columnist for Boston Magazine.

Macero, who left the Herald a few years ago and is now a vice president at O’Neill and Associates, also happens to be one of a handful of plausible replacements for Bailey. So what about it?

More on WBZ

How big a story is the downsizing at WBZ-TV (Channels 4 and 38)? Bigger than the Globe plays it — a small story inside City & Region. [Correction: I’ve been told that it made the front of City & Region in some editions.] But not as big as the Herald seems to think, with a huge front-page package.

With three well-known names — sports anchor Bob Lobel, entertainment reporter Joyce Kulhawik and on-air news guy Scott Wahle — departing the station, the local-newscast glory days of the 1970s and ’80s are starting to look more and more like the distant past.

Oddly, though, it may be the most retro of the three, Lobel, who still has a future in local television. As Herald columnist Steve Buckley points out, the newscasts have shrunk their sports segments in recent years because the obsessives have left for NESN, ESPN and the like.

If Lobel wants to keep working and doesn’t mind taking a substantial pay cut, he could presumably slide into a prime slot on cable tomorrow. Except when the Red Sox are playing, NESN still resembles a local-access outfit more than it does a professional operation. I like Bob Ryan’s show, but Lobel would really help.

By the way — think Dan Rea has had any second thoughts about moving from television to radio? No, I don’t think so, either.

Finally, the Outraged Liberal has some worthwhile observations on the WBZ cuts and related media matters.

The bell tolls for WBZ

If any broadcast news operation could avoid cuts, you’d like to think it would be WBZ. With two television stations (Channels 4 and 38), a powerhouse news-and-talk (AM 1030) radio station and an unusually good, video-laden Web site, the CBS-owned operation should have been in a strong position.

Unfortunately, 30 people are being let go, according to this Jessica Heslam piece in the Boston Herald. According to a story by Bill Carter in the New York Times, CBS is cutting back nationally, and Boston is being hit harder than just about anywhere.

Another slap for Judge Murphy

This has become the story that won’t die, and I’m sick of it. So take it away, Jessica Van Sack:

The Commission on Judicial Conduct has recommended Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy be publicly censured, suspended without pay for 30 days and fined $25,000 for sending two “bizarre” and “threatening” letters to the publisher of the Boston Herald.

Globe story here.