Oh, yes he did. Some curious backtracking today about the investigation into Pete Townshend's visits to child-pornography websites. (He admits that it's true, so no "alleged.") Today's New York Times update includes this weasel paragraph:

Mr. Townshend, who says he suspects he was abused as a child, said he had viewed child pornography on the Internet -- but had not downloaded it -- while researching his autobiography and as part of his longtime campaign against child sexual abuse.

The Boston Globe ran a correction on page A2, blaming it all on the Associated Press and adding: "Townshend said only that he had used his credit card to enter the site and told a London newspaper he had never downloaded child pornography." And, yes, the AP has "corrected" its original report.

Geez. Don't these people know anything?

If Townshend "viewed child pornography on the Internet," as the Times reports, then he downloaded it. Every page you visit on the Web downloads to your computer. When the little "E" or "N" is moving in the upper right corner of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, it's telling you that the page you've requested is in the process of being -- yes -- downloaded.

Townsend apparently means that he didn't save any of the images he'd downloaded to his hard drive, but that's a distinction without a difference. As his lawyer has no doubt explained to him by now, the images he admits to having looked at may actually be on his hard drive, whether he realizes it or not. Unfortunately for Townshend, his computer is currently in the hands of the authorities.

If the editors at the AP, the Times, and the Globe had an ounce of understanding about the way the Internet works, they would have realized that no correction or clarification was needed.

John Ellis's Case history. Former Globe columnist John Ellis has a terrific piece on the post-Steve Case future of AOL Time Warner that appears on the editorial page of today's Wall Street Journal. Paul Gigot must agree, since it's been left off the free OpinionJournal.com site and is available to paid subscribers only. (In case you do subscribe, here's the link.) Here's my favorite part:

The notion that the company can now coalesce around a common purpose is laughable. Time Warner has always been about egomaniacs running fiefdoms and raiding each other's turf. Division heads collaborate only to kill off rivals. They collaborated to kill off former COO Robert Pittman and Chairman Case. Now they'll start on each other.

Baby maybe, doggie definitely. One way to tell whether or not a couple ought to be allowed to adopt a child is if they would choose a dog over a baby. Maybe the state has no right to tell prospective parents that they can't have a German shepherd in the house. But it is one way to sort out the ones who are serious from the ones who aren't.

Kathleen Brophy and Maria Melchionda chose their dog over a baby. That's fine. But would someone please tell them to shut up?

BU J-school prof: Edit pages are partisan. Get over it. The Globe's Mark Jurkowitz today has an overview on the controversy at the Herald over the hiring of longtime Republican politico Virginia Buckingham as deputy editorial-page editor. The editor of CommonWealth magazine, Bob Keough, gets off the best quote, telling Jurkowitz, "If she were going to get a desk in the newsrooom, that would be a problem. I'm not sure it raises that many red flags to be on the editorial page." But Buckingham made me wince in saying, "My dream has always been to pursue a writing career," which only highlights the yawning gap between her complete lack of experience and the plum job she's been handed.

Meanwhile, Boston University journalism professor Mike Berlin can't understand what all the fuss is about. He sent a long and thoughtful e-mail to Media Log, which appears below:

I heard about the Buckingham conflict at the Herald on "Beat the Press," and found myself quite puzzled about why reporters took it upon themselves to voice a protest, and what conflicts of interest there could possibly be for a person whose job it is to reflect the views of the publisher/owner and commit those views to print.

When your boss writes about expanding Fenway Park to swallow the Phoenix office, there are conflicts of interest inherent in his viewpoint. But as the owner he is entitled to express it in an editorial or have an editorial writer express it for him, and since they are his views, it doesn't much matter who the writer may be.

If he were a former state commissioner with some link to a party or a faction, one would expect him to reflect the viewpoint of that party or faction, very much the way that Herald publisher Pat Purcell is linked to various people, issues and ideology and is expected to reflect that viewpoint on the editorial page of the Herald, or through the people he chooses to hire to do the writing for him. If they can't write very well, then that's his problem, and perhaps he will get an editor to look over their copy before it runs, or perhaps he won't and people will think less of his views because they are not well expressed.

Readers should be aware that the editorial page reflects the views of the owner. If they are not aware, that is their lookout, not his. He already has an ideologue of his choosing as the editor of the page, and columnists who reflect the views he wishes to have expressed. It should be clear where the Herald stands. If Purcell is generous enough to listen to other voices before expressing the paper's views, that may be a bonus, but no one should expect it.

But you want people on the edit page who have strong opinions and advocate causes, not people who are neutral, cautious and dull, and write editorials that waffle and don't come down on one side or another.

But why should this matter to the reporters? Their concern is to maintain the wall between news pages and editorial pages; ensure that readers are aware of the difference; and fight to prevent the editorial-page views from slopping into their own copy and their editors' news choices. That is what they should be fighting for. When I worked at Dolly Schiff's New York Post, Paul Sann, the executive edtior, reveled in running stories that made Dolly's viewpoints, and thus Jimmy Wechsler's editorials, look silly. It was his way of showing the city that the news/editorial wall was impregnable.

The bad rap on Rupert Murdoch and his style of journalism is not that he hired frothers-at-the-mouth to run his edit page and sound like ideologues. That was well within the American tradition. The problem with his journalism was that he didn't let the news pages run on the basis of journalistic choices, but forced out stuff that he didn't like editorially (stories about environmental threats, or stories that made Jimmy Carter look good) and forced in stories that were politicized. And in a modified form, that remains true today of both Boston newspapers; readers do think that they pull punches on news stories to match editorial-page views.

By protesting the choice of an edit writer, Herald reporters are suggesting to the public that what is printed there does in fact tarnish the news coverage. They are admitting a link that they should be rejecting and denying.

I speak as someone who wrote edits as a summer replacement both under Dolly and under Rupert, when he attended the weekly editorial meeting personally and had long arguments with Jimmy Wechsler about abortion, afffirmative action and other issues (he was against capital punishment) and then went back to my job as a reporter, fighting as best I could to get stuff into the paper that the boss wouldn't like, and to keep stuff out of the paper that was propaganda for the boss's pet projects.

Buckingham is simply a reminder that all editorial pages are appropriately opinionated, slanted, biased, and reflect the viewpoint of the owner (or the owner's willingness to allow a range of viewpoints to be expressed), rather than fair and balanced and open to all viewpoints, as the news pages should be.

Media Log goes policy wonk! People don't want smaller government and lower taxes. They want bigger government and lower taxes. They want it all, and they want it right now. Politicians can choose between trying to explain that, you know, stuff costs money, or they can pander. The latter is a sure route to success. Mitt Romney last year pandered his way right into the corner office.

During the campaign, Romney said he could close the state's gaping budget deficit by putting his world-class management skills to work, by slashing the bureaucracy and eliminating duplication while not raising taxes and not cutting "essential" services. (Essential services are things that you need. Non-essential services are things that somebody else needs.) Of course he couldn't, and he began backtracking the moment he was elected.

Now he wants the legislature to give him the authority to cut local aid to the bone, which will force schools to close early and police officers and firefighters to be laid off. (Click here for today's Globe coverage, and here for today's Herald coverage.)

Since the legislators lack both guts and brains, they're almost certain to go along, notwithstanding their plaintive cry to Romney to explain what he's got in mind. But they shouldn't. Here's what they ought to do:

• Borrow the $600 million needed to get through the rest of the fiscal year without any further cuts.
• Reform the state tax system. That means going ahead with the voter-approved mandate to return the state income tax to five percent, but rethinking and possibly repealing the $3 billion to $4 billion in tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy that were passed during the 1990s. That's where the money is. Here's a good place to start: reversing the special-interest tax break that Fidelity got in the mid-'90s. Wonder what former Fidelity executive Robert Pozen -- currently receiving all kinds of praise for serving in the Romney administration without pay -- would think about that?
• Go after the hackerama head-on. Today's Herald reports that MDC commissioner David Balfour continues to run amok, and that virtually the first act of Tim for Treasurer was to reward one of Tom Finneran's coat-holders with the six-figure job of "running" the Lottery. Ugh.

Give Buckingham a chance. She has no obvious qualifications, as I wrote last month. Her conflicts of interest make one's head spin, as Northeastern University School of Journalism director Steve Burgard argues. Certain elements of the newsroom are skeptical, to put it mildly (third item). But the Herald today, as expected, announced that former Massport director and Republican political operative Virginia Buckingham will be the paper's new deputy editorial-page editor.

So let me be counterintuitive for a moment. Buckingham is young, smart, and hardworking. She's a moderate conservative, presumably live-and-let-live on cultural issues. One fear is that she'll serve as a mole -- a back channel from the Herald to her Republican friends. But is that really fair? After 9/11, Buckingham was pretty much hung out to dry by everyone. The Weld-Cellucci-Swift crowd (though not Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci themselves) piled on. As for the new crowd, Mitt Romney has surrounded himself with aides to former state treasurer Joe Malone, against whom Buckingham fought as a top political aide to Cellucci in 1998.

In other words, there's every reason to believe that Buckingham is finished with politics and wants to do a good job at the Herald. She deserves a chance to prove it.

Steve Case's amazing swindle. Steve Case's epitaph is that bamboozling Time Warner -- the largest media company in the world -- was an insufficient qualification for running it. Case quit as chairman of AOL Time Warner last night because the company's stock price has tanked since Case's AOL acquired Time Warner two years ago.

But as James Surowiecki observed in the New Yorker a few months ago (no link; I'm going by memory here, so bear with me), Case actually did spectacularly well by his shareholders -- that is, the folks who held hyperinflated AOL stock before the merger. AOL Time Warner's stock at this moment is $14.88, which is a lot lower than the $56 or so that it commanded at the time of the merger. But if Case hadn't gone out and bought a real company with his pile of AOL funny money, his crappy and outmoded online service would probably be trading for less than $5 right now.

Of course, the real reason I'm writing this item is so that I can recycle a bit from Tina Brown's debut column last fall in the Times of London, in which she quoted Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes's priceless letter to former Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, the man who, more than anyone, got swindled by Case. Hughes's letter begins:

How can I convey to you the disgust which your name awakens in me? The merger with Warner was a catastrophe. But the hitherto unimagined stupidity, the blind arrogance of your deal with Case simply beggars description.

How can you face yourself knowing how much history, value and savings you have thrown away on your mad, ignorant attempt to merge with a wretched dial-up ISP? . . .

I don't know what advice you have to offer, but I have some for you. Buy some rope, go out the back, find a tree and hang yourself. If you had any honour you would.

Is that great or what? Thanks to Joe Conason for the link.

Poisoned Apple. Filmmaker John Farrell saw my post on Apple's renewed war with Microsoft and sent along this link. It's from a website/blog called USS Clueless, by Steven Den Beste, and it's a long, difficult, but ultimately rewarding trip to the Heart of Geekness.

Den Beste's depressing conclusion: things will continue to get worse and worse for Apple, because its closed architecture and low volume have locked it into an endless cycle of higher and higher software-development costs relative to its Wintel cousins. And because of bad decisions Apple has made over the years, there's really nothing Steve Jobs and company can do to reverse course.

I still want one of the new 12-inch G4 PowerBooks, though.

Farrell and his father, retired Globe columnist David Farrell, have a website and blog that you should check out.

Jurkowitz on McDonough. The Phoenix website has posted a classic profile of Will McDonough that Mark Jurkowitz (then of the Phoenix, now of the Globe) wrote in January 1994. The headline: "Jurassic Jock." And I think it's the single best piece anyone has ever written about the two-fisted sportswriting legend.

Will McDonough's legacy. He was a crank. He was a legend. He was both. Globe sports columnist Will McDonough died last night at the age of 67, depriving Boston of one of its most cantankerous and original voices. The news is just starting to break, so there's not much out there yet other than this Associated Press report. He died with his boots on, watching ESPN's SportsCenter.

I would imagine the place to be for McDonough fans today is Mike Barnicle's 10 a.m.-to-noon show on WTKK-FM (96.9 FM), where McDonough was a regular Friday guest. A couple of years ago McDonough officially retired from the Globe, although he continued writing his column on a freelance basis. Talk about having your cake and eating it too: McDonough was able to work out a sweet deal, continuing to draw a paycheck from the Globe while taking potshots at the Globe's young, liberal newsroom during his stints on the air.

As recently as last week McDonough swung hard at Red Sox president Larry Lucchino, who's embroiled in a feud with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner appears to hate Lucchino so much that he's willing to spend even more of his money than usual (not an easy trick) in order to keep the Red Sox well out of contention. McDonough endorsed Steinbrenner's characterization of Lucchino as a "chameleon," adding:

Lucchino has a face for all occasions, but, unfortunately, very little knowledge of baseball. He was slotted into the Red Sox job by his good friend, Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, who wanted to ensure that he would have Boston's vote in his pocket whenever he needed it.

The Globe also ran an excerpt from the McDonough-ghosted Bill Parcells autobiography last week to shed light on Parcells's decision to become head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.

One of the raps on McDonough was that he talked only to owners and to the biggest of bigshots, such as Parcells and Red Auerbach. But the flip side was that, more often than not, they talked only to him, giving him a steady stream of exclusives. In an era of bland, faceless journalism, McDonough offered personality and vitriol, making him one of the most consistently readable columnists in the Globe.

Here's an interview McDonough did a couple of years ago with Teen Ink, a website for teenagers.

And here's an archive of his recent Globe columns.

J. Bo strikes back on his baby-eating story. The Weekly Standard's J. Bottum today responds to what by his own account were numerous critics -- including Media Log -- who told him he'd fallen for an urban legend or two in his heinous post last Friday on alleged baby-eating in China. Here's what I wrote about it.

Bottum's long response is worth reading in its entirety, but first, a few observations.

• In essense, Bottum challenges his critics to prove that it didn't happen. Hasn't he ever heard the tired-but-true saw that you can't prove a negative? There really is no documentary evidence that it did happen, and plenty of reason to be skeptical.
• Bottum asserts that the very fact that these stories are circulating -- and that Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu claims to have eaten a stillborn baby -- says something important about the culture, regardless of whether these stories are actually true. His conclusion: "The picture of a culture of death is being created in front of us. Don't look at the individual pieces as they are held up, one by one. Look at the puzzle that's being filled in." Actually, I suspect he could have written a pretty good column about what it means that such apparently bogus stories are circulating. But that's not what he wrote last Friday. Is it really necessary to say that the truth matters?
• The headline on the e-mail version of my piece -- though not the Web version -- referred to Bottum's original post as a "blood libel." Bottum notes that the About.com urban-legends site that I referred to uses the phrase "blood libel," and then casually adds that "this is where the Boston Phoenix lifted the 'blood libel' bit." Lifted? Is Bottum always this careless with language? Hey, J. Bo, look at my first post again. I not only linked to the About.com piece, but I also quoted from it, including the "blood libel" bit. Since when did quoting become "lifting"?

It's a man's world. You might read Joan Vennochi's column in today's Globe -- in which she argues that Massachusetts is a particularly inhospitable environment for women politicians -- and say, "Oh, come on."

But then you turn to the City & Region section and find this lose-your-breakfast piece by Stephanie Ebbert on how male legislators (including House Speaker Tom Finneran) are making Father Knows Best-style quips about having to check with the little woman before deciding whether to take a pay raise.

Next you pick up the Herald, and are told in a front-page report by David Guarino that you're supposed to be outraged that Jane Swift continued to make gubernatorial appointments until she was no longer governor. (Okay, it sounds like she made a couple of bad appointments. Like that's never happened before.)

And you have to conclude that Vennochi is right when she says that "Massachusetts is still very much an Irish-American, Italian-American, patriarchal, Catholic state. Culturally and politically, man is king here -- to himself and to many women."

Apple's new war on Microsoft. Since Steve Jobs's return to Apple in the late 1990s, the company he co-founded has survived -- even prospered -- under sort of a Pax Microsoftia. Bill Gates invested some of Microsoft's spare change in Apple, and Apple made Microsoft's Internet Explorer the default browser on its Macintoshes.

Far more important, Apple did everything it could to ensure the success of Microsoft Office, the Mac version of which costs an obscene $499, or a considerably more reasonable $199 for new-Mac buyers. Apple's competing product, AppleWorks, was included free of charge only on Apple's consumer-market Macs; buyers of Macs aimed at professionals would have to shell out an additional $79. Moreover, there is no easy, seamless way of sharing files between the AppleWorks and Office worlds, as my irritated editors would be the first to tell you.

Now Jobs has apparently decided to go to war against Microsoft. Yesterday's new-product announcements, at MacWorld in San Francisco, are just the latest sign that David wants to compete head-to-head with Goliath. Last year, for instance, Apple unveiled its quirky and effective "Switch" ads in an attempt to get Windows users to come over to Apple. Of course, Apple has always depended on people preferring the Mac operating system to Windows, but there is a snarky "Windows sucks" tone to the "Switch" ads that belie the two companies' supposed alliance.

Also, the Mac enthusiast site Think Secret reported in October that the next version of AppleWorks -- which could be unveiled any day now -- was aiming for "[f]ull compatibility with Microsoft Office." Since compatibility is one of the few reasons anyone would shell out for the cumbersome Office, the ability to share files hassle-free would amount to a huge disincentive for buying Office.

Thus, the real interest in yesterday's announcement was not the two new PowerBook laptops, cool though they may be. It was that Apple will soon replace Internet Explorer as the default browser with a new browser of its own, called Safari, which is supposed to run three times faster than IE -- and that Apple will also market a $99 presentation program called Keynote that will compete directly with Microsoft's ubiquitous PowerPoint, one of Office's components.

Will it work? San Jose Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor is skeptical but intrigued, writing that if Apple really intends to go after Microsoft, "it means more competition. That's healthier all around."

Apple obviously has a difficult road. With something like five percent of the market share, it needs to cater to the needs of customers who live in a Microsoft-dominated world. Who cares how great Keynote might be, for example, if its files are incompatible with those of PowerPoint? Yet unless Apple maintains its edge as a technologically superior alternative, it really has no reason to exist.

That's why I use Apple products, but invest in Microsoft. I don't see any reason to rethink either decision.

Incomparably critical. Bob Somerby's excellent Daily Howler site calls attention to -- and takes issue with -- my recent item on liberal and conservative media bias. Somerby can't believe I said that the liberal media tend to be moderate to conservative on economic issues, and criticizes my "rollover attitude."

Oddly enough, he tries to sic Bill Clinton on me, even though Clinton himself is the very embodiment of modern liberalism, which isn't all that liberal except on cultural issues. Clinton managed the economy like an Eisenhower Republican, and signed a welfare-reform bill that only a conservative could love.

Somerby approvingly quotes Clinton as saying, "They have an increasingly right-wing and bellicose conservative press. And we have an increasingly docile establishment press." Clinton is right. But his successful repositioning of liberalism is one of the prime reasons for that.

Perhaps George W. Bush, by managing the economy like a right-wing extremist rather than an Eisenhower Republican, will help change that. He's starting to make Clinton's cautious centrism look like liberal activism.

The reading list. The new issue of the Unitarian Univeralist World contains an essay I wrote on my weekend with the American Atheists -- an expansion and update of a piece I did for the Phoenix last year. The World also includes a comprehensive overview by Wendy Kaminer on the fate of civil liberties post-9/11.

Farewell to David Shribman. Before David Shribman came to the Globe, the paper had no such thing as a nonpartisan political essayist. In his nearly 10 years here, Shribman has perfected a certain type of column: gracefully written, insightful, and never mean-spirited or ideologically driven. Today's is typical. He takes an obvious story -- the pack of Democrats getting ready to challenge President Bush -- and does the atypical, making smart comparisons between now and 1992, when another pack of Democrats was getting ready to challenge an earlier President Bush, also at a time of war and economic uncertainty.

Unfortunately, we won't have a chance to read Shribman much longer. Soon he'll pack up his Pulitzer and leave Washington to take a new job, as editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He'll be missed.

Bush at Ground Zero. George W. Bush continues to be a disaster on policy (another tax cut for the rich?), but he remains a master political strategist. Now he's actually given himself a longshot but realistic chance of winning heavily Democratic New York in 2004 by scheduling the Republican National Convention in New York City. He'll be able to drape himself in all the patriotic symbolism of 9/11, while the Democrats will be partying with us here in Boston. Hey, I love the idea of a national convention in our hometown, but as politics it's dumb, dumb, dumb.

The snooze on online politics. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report out today on the extent to which people go online for political news. And though the report -- with the scintillating title of "Modest Increase in Internet Use for Campaign 2002" -- is entirely non-startling, there is one aspect that jumps out: the most common practice reported was visiting the websites of large, established media such as the New York Times, CNN, and local news organizations. How ... uninteresting.

The Pew survey did report an increase since 2000 from 19 percent to 32 percent in "online election news consumers" who "went most often to government and candidate websites or sites that specialize in politics." But the overall percentage of people who reported getting any political news online has increased only modestly since 1998 (from 15 percent to 22 percent). The preferred source of political news for most people remains television.

A few years ago, it looked as though politics was going to move to the Internet in a big way. The paradigmatic example was Politics.com, which hired Watergate veteran Carl Bernstein to make the rounds on its behalf during the 2000 campaign. But Politics.com began downsizing before Election Day, although it still exists in diminished form -- complete with a blurb from a piece that I wrote for the Phoenix three years ago calling it "the one essential site." Sorry, but it doesn't look all that essential these days.

The GOP's over-the-top attack on Edwards. Phoenix editor Peter Kadzis passes along this link from the Republican National Committee attacking Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards. I hold no brief for the faux populist from North Carolina, whose icky habit of commenting on his own regular-guyness was neatly skewered by TNR &c. last week. But isn't this a bit much?

Foozling with the senior senator. One would think that the last thing we need is another profile of Ted Kennedy. But Charlie Pierce's, in Sunday's Boston Globe Magazine, is a good one. Pierce also offers a new meaning for "foozling" that I like better than the old one. And I plan to use it, after a decent interval has passed.