Media Nation

Here’s one good thing that will likely come out of the latest revelation about Deval Patrick: If he hangs on and wins the governor’s race, he’s not going to begin his 2012 presidential campaign the next day.

The Boston Herald’s Dave Wedge reports today that Patrick spent at least part of his time in the Clinton administration sending letters to prison officials around the country telling them to stop serving meals to inmates that were too hot or too cold, and to make sure their sheets were cleaned three times a week.

Now, I don’t want to get sucked into the Herald’s faux-populist inmate-bashing. Criminals are sent to prison to do time — not to be shackled in airless closets 24 hours a day and fed nothing but bread and water. There is supposed to be a rehabilitative aspect to being locked up, after all.

But, at least on the face of it, the Herald’s reporting suggests that Patrick’s values are out of whack with those of most people. I’m glad he was looking out for the legitimate rights of prison inmates, but this does seem to go quite a bit too far, no?

The next poll is going to be pretty interesting. Patrick was ahead by 25 points a couple of weeks ago, but that was before Kerry Healey and her supporters started blasting him as a criminal-coddling weenie.

In today’s Boston Globe, Frank Phillips writes, unsurprisingly, that the Patrick campaign believes Healey’s attacks aren’t working, and that the Healey campaign believes they are.

Might we be getting the results of another poll this Sunday?

Update: Patrick’s lead has shrunk considerably, according to the latest “fast track” poll from WBZ-TV (Channel 4).

I finally had a chance to see Steven Delano’s documentary about coming to terms with his dwarfism, “No Bigger Than a Minute.”

It’s excellent (disclosure: Delano includes part of an interview he conducted with me in 2003); and Delano, a longtime filmmaker, includes a number of unusual artistic touches. In that respect, it’s quite different from the TLC series “Little People, Big World,” a straightforward reality series starring Matt and Amy Roloff and their family.

Unfortunately, “No Bigger Than a Minute” is not getting much play locally. I got it by setting the VCR to turn on at 4 a.m. on Sunday and tape Channel 44. But catch it if you can.

The New York Times and the Boston Globe are in the midst of major series this week on the preferential treatment that religion — and especially evangelical Christianity — are receiving during the Bush years. The Times series, by Diana Henriques, is online here. The latest installment of the Globe series, a team effort, is here.

Of the two, I think the Globe’s is more timely and more disturbing, dealing as it does with White House support of Christian organizations that provide foreign aid. The image is that of the ugly American, overtly attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity, and making more enemies for the United States through their blundering arrogance.

The Times series details an entirely different phenomenon — how religious organizations are wrapping themselves in the First Amendment to run roughshod over local zoning laws, to violate protections for sick employees, and to extend their tax breaks to profitable ventures such as housing.

Yes, I’m a big fan of the First Amendment, but it would be as if a newspaper publisher claimed that freedom of the press exempted him from having to follow OSHA guidelines.

We tend to be so focused on the disaster in Iraq that we often forget that George W. Bush and the Republican Congress are obliterating the separation of church and state. The Globe and Times series are useful reminders of that.

Media Nation reader B.C. sends along this screen shot from the Salem News Web site:

What would make this even funnier is if it turned out that the News uses a content-management system that automatically pulled in a Salem State College ad to accompany the story.

From today’s New York Times corrections:

An entry on the hardcover best-seller list on Page 34 of the Book Review today, for “The Greatest Story Ever Sold,” by Frank Rich, omitted part of the name of the publishing imprint. It is Penguin Press, not Penguin.

Don’t you feel better now?

And if you don’t get the headline, click here.

Media Nation reader M.G. sends along word that the Boston.com entertainment message board is promoting a “Blow Job Workshop for Women in Oct.” I hightailed over to see for myself, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it hadn’t been taken down yet. Click here and scroll down (it’s under “New Message Boards”), although it will probably be gone by the time you get there. At least at this moment, as the screen capture shows, it’s also getting prominent billing on the main Arts & Entertainment page.

This is neither the result of a massive brain cramp nor a prank. Drill down and you’ll see a detailed description of a “Fellatio Workshop,” along with this helpful syllabus: “This is NOT simply a ‘blow job’ workshop. Anyone can learn tips and skills to use when performing oral sex. What makes you GREAT at it is having the desire and the confidence to do it.” You can also sign up for a striptease class, or for “Sexology 101: Ladies, Get More Pleasure in Bed.”

Now, I have no problem with such content, and except for the “Blow Job” come-on, it’s not actually on Boston.com. As far as I can tell, these are legitimate offerings, and how else are people supposed to find out about them? Somehow, though, I don’t think the folks at Boston.com would agree.

Update: It’s 2:52 p.m., and the notice is still up on both pages. So I guess a new era has dawned at Boston.com.

Update II: It’s 10:01 p.m. now, and it’s gone.

One of the exhilarating — and intimidating — things about teaching a course on Web journalism is that my students invariably know things that I don’t. There’s no way to keep up with everything. I’ve got an RSS aggregator, NewsFire, that dings every time one of them has posted something new. These days, it’s dinging a lot.

I’ve just spent the last half-hour reading updates, and though there were a lot of terrific posts, I was particularly taken by this, from Rajashree Joshi, on a new feature being offered by the Washington Times: Click on a story, and a female-voiced robot (or maybe it’s a robotic-sounding female) will read it to you.

I find audio innovations to be inherently interesting because it’s the ultimate medium for multitasking. You can’t read or watch video while you’re driving, raking leaves or doing the laundry, but you can certainly listen. That’s why, amid all of the technological advances of recent years, the greatest news success story is public radio. It’s not that it’s so wonderful (although it often is); it’s because it reaches people where they are: stuck in traffic, on their way to or from work.

But radio news stories — even serious radio news stories, such as NPR’s offerings — are a lot shorter than text-based news. The two media are not alike, and one doesn’t translate well to the other. Consider this story in today’s Washington Times on the House ethics committee’s investigation into who knew what about former congressman Mark Foley, the Capitol Hill king of instant messaging. It’s only 1,060 words long — about average for an important news story.

Click on it, though, and you’ll find that it takes seven minutes and 14 seconds to hear the whole thing. Assuming you could port this over to your iPod and play it over your car stereo (it looks doable but not easy), that would take up a significant portion of your commute.

By contrast, a similar story on NPR’s “Morning Edition” today checks in at just 3:51.

The Washington Times deserves credit for experimenting with different ways of delivering its content. But as media analyst Barry Parr is quoted as saying in the Times’ own article introducing the feature, “I don’t understand what they are trying to do here.”

Seth Gitell blogs on food. And let me tell you, Seth knows his food. We’ve had some memorable eating experiences on the political trail over the years. Perhaps the most memorable: stopping at R.B. and Big Daddy’s Rib Shack in Waterbury, Conn., on the way home from the Republican National Convention in Philadephia in 2000.

The Boston Globe’s pro-Deval Patrick editorial page and moderately liberal Globe columnist Scot Lehigh both put their finger on the real problems raised by the way Patrick has handled his past support for convicted rapist Benjamin LaGuer.

From the editorial:

His failure to disclose at an earlier point his contribution to the DNA test might have been just a memory glitch. In that case, his error was in not doing a more thorough review before describing his involvement with LaGuer. Or, more seriously, he might have not mentioned the contribution initially because he wanted to hide this deeper connection to LaGuer.

The editorialist, not being a mind-reader, refrained from saying the obvious: It seems pretty unlikely that Patrick’s memory is as bad as he claims.

From Lehigh’s column:

Further, Patrick’s own account of the role he played leaves one wondering about his judgment. In a Wednesday interview, Patrick said that he didn’t know LaGuer, adding that “I can’t say I studied the record with care.”

“The issue that came to my attention at the time was the fairness of his trial and particularly the fairness of the jury deliberations,” he told me.

Legitimate concerns, certainly, but why, then, had he pushed for parole for LaGuer and not a new trial? Because he wasn’t representing LaGuer, and anyway, “you don’t address that to the parole board,” Patrick said. “The only thing you can address to the parole board is his readiness for parole.”

But if he didn’t know LaGuer, it’s difficult to see how he could make a responsible assessment of that readiness.

“I had corresponded with him,” Patrick noted later. “You get an impression of him from that correspondence.”

What can you say, other than, “Oof”?

To repeat, there was nothing wrong with Patrick’s pushing for a DNA test for LaGuer, who was widely believed to be innocent until he flunked said test in 2002. Nor was there anything wrong with Patrick’s legal work on behalf of a cop-killer facing the death penalty. But his correspondence with LaGuer was way too supportive, and the way he’s handling the fallout has been wretched.

And Jon Keller reports that it’s about to get worse.

Patrick is very lucky that Kerry Healey’s only positive themes are that she’s going to do in her next four years what she and Mitt Romney failed to do in the previous four.

There’s a torrent rushing by, and I’ve only got a thimble. But here are a few drops:

Howie Carr yesterday took a call on his WRKO (AM 680) talk show from a woman in Maine who was very, very upset about Deval Patrick’s proposal to allow illegal immigrants who’ve gone to high school in Massachusetts to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities. (Howie also seems to think there’s a loophole that would allow anyone who manages to swim ashore to be eligible for in-state tuition the next day, but that’s another matter.)

The woman then complained that her daughter has to pay $40,000 a year to attend Northeastern University. Northeastern, of course, is a private school, and there is absolutely nothing that Patrick or any government official could do to lower tuition at NU for illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, nonimmigrants or anyone else.

Carr not only didn’t correct her, but he egged her on, bringing up the $40,000 figure several times before bringing the conversation to a close.

But what does Howie care? He’s already been promoting the false notion that Patrick supports “free” tuition for illegal immigrants. His Sept. 20 Boston Herald column contains just one of several examples I’ve found: “Deval doesn’t just want to give them in-state (i.e., free) tuition, he wants to give them drivers’ licenses, too.”

What’s with the parenthetical “i.e., free”? In fact, the in-state tuition rate is not zero, as any parent of a kid who goes to UMass knows. (Indeed, as Howie himself knows.) For the real figures, read this.