Media Nation

I was listening to WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) this morning when Democratic political consultant Dan Payne popped up to talk about last night’s gubernatorial debate. I had not yet seen it, so I took Payne at face value when he said Deval Patrick had spent the hour sweating like Richard Nixon. Among other things, Payne (a former Patrick adviser) said the oceans of perspiration made Patrick seem “nervous,” and that he ought to fire his makeup artist.

Well, now. I’ve just finished watching a tape of the debate, and I can tell you that Patrick didn’t sweat, period. No gusher. No rivulet. Not even a drop. Patrick was shiny, but it looked to me as though there was a stray light blasting him on the right side of his face. But he was dry, and appeared calm, cool and collected for the entire hour.

This is kind of a big deal. I would imagine that far more people heard Payne this morning than actually watched the debate last night. Indeed, other than the candidates’ mothers, I may be the only person on the planet who taped it. So Payne’s mistaken observation that Patrick sweat nervously is going to stick with a lot of people. WBUR ought to broadcast a correction. This is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact, and Payne got it wrong.

Interestingly enough, anchor Bob Oakes didn’t disagree with Payne. Now, I don’t know whether Payne was present at the Kennedy School last night, but I’ll bet he was. And that might be the problem. To Oakes (who was on the panel of questioners) and Payne, it may well have looked like Patrick was sweating. Viewers at home know better.

I’ll agree with Payne on this: Last night we witnessed the political suicide of Tom Reilly. Good grief. More later.

Update: Some folks are telling me I’m wrong — that Patrick really was sweating. One yes-he-was-sweating observer was sitting several feet from the candidates. Sorry, but I’m going to stick with my lying eyes on this. After all, I was several inches from the candidates. I was primed to look for sweat. I walked up to the TV, inspecting Patrick’s face as carefully as I could. He wasn’t sweating.

Update II: Dan Payne writes, “I watched debate at home on TV, not at K School. Maybe it was bad lighting but Deval Patrick looked like he was sweating the whole night. But why sweat the small stuff?” OK, OK. Time for my modified limited hangout. I’ll give WBUR a pass on running a correction — too many people agree with Payne that Patrick was sweating. But they’re all wrong!

Boston Globe publisher Richard Gilman has announced his retirement. The first non-Taylor to run the Globe, Gilman — dispatched to Boston by the New York Times Co. in 1999 — has presided over successes (bringing in Marty Baron as the editor in 2001) and disasters (the mindboggling failure to protect customer credit-card records).

New publisher Steve Ainsley’s priority will be to build the Times Co.’s chief New England asset. No, not the Globe, but Boston.com. Despite steeply declining circulation, the Globe and its chief rival, the Boston Herald, may have about as many readers as they’ve ever had when you count Web visitors.

Ainsley’s job will be to figure out how to make that pay.

I’m no expert on Iranian politics, so maybe I was wrong about former president Mohammed Khatami. I’d always thought he was a somewhat pro-Western reformer, albeit one who was gutless enough to do nothing when his enemies thwarted his agenda and jailed his supporters. (Not that the president of Iran is anything more than a front man for the theocrats who actually run the country.)

But the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby, writing yesterday, and the Boston Herald’s Brent Arends, following up today, note that Khatami helped create and continues to praise Hezbollah. Which shows that, as Ronald Reagan learned in the 1980s, the phrase “Iranian moderate” is something of an oxymoron.

Still, the State Department has paved the way for Khatami to visit the United States, and Harvard has invited him to speak. So for Gov. Mitt Romney to refuse to provide State Police protection amounts to something of an assault on Khatami’s right to speak, since Khatami is obviously someone who will be in dire need of protection during his time here. There’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy here as well. As Channel 4’s Jon Keller observes, “The governor had no qualms about chowing down with and paying for police escorts for Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during his visit here in 2003. Isn’t China a major-league human-rights violator, or have I missed something?”

Good for Mayor Tom Menino for offering the Boston police as a substitute.

What precisely is to be gained by trying to silence Khatami? The Kennedy School’s Graham Allison tells the Globe that he will insist that Khatami answer his successor’s call for “wiping Israel off the map.” That’s a yes-or-no question that’s worth hearing the answer to.

Please note that I’m not saying that inviting Khatami to Harvard is a great idea. Marty Peretz, a Harvard professor and co-owner of The New Republic, tells the Crimson:

[Khatami is] “a front for a despicable dictatorial regime” and that the event would not provide an opportunity to rigorously challenge the former leader.

“Why don’t they invite him to a tough seminar?” he said, adding that he believes the often-crowded question-and-answer sessions at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum are “bullshit.”

Peretz may be right. We’ll see. Certainly Harvard and Kennedy School officials know that the public is counting on them to demand some accountability from Khatami.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to imagine some good coming of this. Even if the “moderate” label doesn’t really fit, Khatami is known to be a bitter enemy of the current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hardliner who denies that the Holocaust took place and who is the public face of Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb. Unsavory though Khatami might be, bolstering his prestige could hurt Ahmadinejad. No doubt that’s why the State Department is bringing Khatami over here.

But all of this is really beside the point. Romney has an obligation to provide security for a controversial speaker so that he can exercise his First Amendment rights — rights that neither Khatami nor anyone else possesses in his own country. As the Globe editorializes today:

Romney saw fit to declare that the Kennedy School’s invitation to Khatami is “a disgrace to the memory of all Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of extremists.” The kindest thing to say about this denunciation of Harvard’s devotion to active and open dialogue is that it illustrates the crucial difference between political thinking and the real thing.

Romney may have “a genius for free PR,” as the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly writes. Unfortunately, crowd-pleasing assaults on free speech play well with the conservative voters whom the governor is courting in his pandering campaign for president.

The Boston Globe’s Jenn Abelson reports today that Ed Ansin, the Miami-based owner of WHDH-TV (Channel 7), is looking to add WLVI-TV (Channel 56) to his roster of television stations, following a similar story in the Boston Herald’s Inside Track a couple of weeks ago.

This is bad news on two levels. The most serious effect of this could be the cancellation of Channel 56’s long-running 10 p.m. newscast, which launched in the mid-1980s with then-governor Michael Dukakis appearing on the set to congratulate anchor Jack Hynes.

Secondarily, this deal would be a significant victory for Ansin, whose flashy, fast-paced, graphics-heavy newscast on Channel 7 represented a diminution of local television news. Unfortunately, the Channel 7 formula proved to be popular enough that it was copied by competitors.

I think I’m in love. Google’s Gmail service is doing a phenomenal job of screening my e-mail for spam. Based on my results so far, I’d recommend this to anyone.

To review: On Saturday, I started forwarding my personal e-mail to a Gmail account I had just established. I also set Gmail so that I can download my mail to Entourage. In order to get a handle on what was going on, I would also examine the spam folder in my Gmail account every time I downloaded my mail to Entourage. (Earlier items here and here.)

Between Sunday at 10:50 a.m. and today at 10:30 a.m., I kept track and got the following results:

• Good (that is, non-spam) e-mails downloaded to Entourage: 114
• Bad (spam) e-mails downloaded to Entourage: 33
• Good e-mails mistakenly caught by Gmail’s spam filter: 4
• Bad e-mails properly caught by Gmail’s spam filter: 178

This is phenomenal performance. I’m especially impressed that only four good e-mails were labeled as spam. False positives are far more annoying than false negatives, because you end up wasting time inspecting everything in your spam folder. Ideally, there would be zero false positives, but four out of 329 (1.2 percent) is something anyone should be able to live with.

Frankly, I’m so impressed that I’m considering forwarding my Northeastern mail to Gmail and doing everything on the Web. That would involve transferring my Entourage address book and calendar to Google, and, of course, it raises some privacy concerns.

This topic has already generated some great comments. Any thoughts about putting your life online instead of on your hard drive? Am I nuts even to consider it?

It might seem sexist to note that Katie Couric showed some leg during her interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman last night — except that the matter of whether the new “CBS Evening News” anchor would display or hide said legs has been the subject of endless speculation.

It might also seem sexist to observe that Couric was wearing too much makeup — except that Friedman, if anything, was wearing even more than she was.

Couric’s debut as the First Woman to Anchor a Network Evening Newscast Alone, Not Counting Women Who’ve Been Substitutes or Elizabeth Vargas After Bob Woodruff Was Hurt in Iraq, went smoothly enough. I think the Boston Globe’s Joanna Weiss got it just about right: no big deal, and the “Free Speech” segment (annoyingly rendered as “freeSpeech”) stunk.

It’s perhaps a tribute to Couric’s genuine skill as an anchor that the complaints today revolve not around her but her newscast. The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley, unusually subdued, says that the program was, well, subdued; Stanley moves on to Rosie O’Donnell’s debut on “The View” as quickly as she can.

The Washington Post’s Tom Shales grouses that Couric anchored a “strange new show” that might be dubbed “The CBS Evening No-News.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Barry Garron writes: “TV’s first solo woman anchor, it seems, will preside over a news-flavored broadcast that consists of one or two news pieces, a few headlines and a host of soft features.”

The newscast got off to a respectably hard-edged start, with Lara Logan reporting from Afghanistan on the resurgent Taliban; Jim Axelrod on President Bush’s latest speech (terrorism is bad, you know); and Couric’s interview with Friedman.

After that, though, it went downhill. Anthony Mason was supposed to report on a huge oil find in the Gulf of Mexico and what it might mean for gas prices. Instead, he focused mainly on the oil companies’ difficult year recovering from 2005’s devastating hurricanes. At least he managed to point out that Shell made a $25 billion profit after letting a Shell executive whine about the “hundreds of millions of dollars” his company had spent on clean-up and repairs.

The Morgan Spurlock “freeSpeech” segment was excruciating, and it’s going to get worse: Rush Limbaugh’s up on Thursday. Will “Couric & Co.,” as they’re calling themselves, invite anyone as far to the left as Limbaugh is to the right? Or will this become yet another outlet whereby a timid news organization counters phony charges of liberal bias by giving a platform to one conservative after another?

Following a vapid look at the Vanity Fair cover of Tom and Katie’s baby, the finish line in sight, things picked up a bit, with a nice Steve Hartman report on a Nicaraguan orphanage and a guy from Wisconsin who arranges for American high-school kids to paint portraits of orphans around the world.

Couric’s sign-off — a look at newscast closings both real and fictional, and a call for viewers to make suggestions on how she might sign off — was silly but harmless.

Overall, I thought Couric’s debut was fine. But far from revolutionizing the way news is delivered, this seems aimed primarily at holding the revolution off for a few more years.

In an otherwise straightforward assessment of Virginia Democratic Senate candidate Jim Webb, The New Republic’s Michelle Cottle writes (sub. req.):

Unlike, say, John Kerry, Webb has a military record that defies “swift-boating” — featuring two Purple Hearts, one Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and a Navy Cross — and an upbringing macho enough to make George Allen drool with envy.

I’m not sure what this means. Yes, Robert Timberg recalls that, one time, a “clot of pus and dead skin the size of a tennis ball blew out of his [Webb’s] knee.” But does that mean that the same folks who mocked Kerry’s war-hero status, spread rumors that John McCain’s Vietnam POW experience made him too crazy to be president, and cast triple-amputee Max Cleland as an unpatriotic coddler of terrorists are somehow going to give Webb a pass?

Uh, probably not.

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.