I was out all night at the Youth Media Fes­ti­val in San Fran­cisco (more on that late tomor­row) and just got home. I’m just start­ing to watch the debate on TiVo, but am happy to hear about this:

CNN / GALLUP POLL ON WHO WON DEBATE

Kerry: 53
Bush: 37

CBS POLL ON WHO WON DEBATE:

Kerry: 44
Bush: 26
Tie: 30

ABC POLL ON WHO WON DEBATE:

Kerry: 45
Bush 36:
Tie: 17

Mort Kon­dracke: “This is the President’s turf, this is the place that the Pres­i­dent is sup­posed to dom­i­nate, ter­ror and the war in Iraq. I don’t think he really dom­i­nated tonight. I think Kerry looked like a commander-in-chief.”

Kate O’Beirne, National Review Online’s the Cor­ner: “I thought the Pres­i­dent was repet­i­tive and reactive.”

Jonah Gold­berg, National Review Online’s the Cor­ner: “The Bush cam­paign mis­cal­cu­lated on hav­ing the first night be for­eign pol­icy night.”

Bob Schi­ef­fer: “The Pres­i­dent was some­what defen­sive in the beginning”

Mark Shields: “The Pres­i­dent showed a few times obvi­ous anger”

Bill Kris­tol, Weekly Stan­dard: “I think Kerry did pretty well tonight, he was force­ful and articulate.”

Bob Schi­ef­fer: “Kerry got off to a very good start.”

Joe Scar­bor­ough, MSNBC: “It was John Kerry’s best per­for­mance ever…As far as the debate goes, I don’t see how any­body could look at this debate and not score this a very clear win on points for John Kerry.”

Andrea Mitchell, MSNBC: “This is the tough­est we’ve ever seen John Kerry. He attacked the very core of the President’s pop­u­lar­ity. He’s basi­cally say­ing, who do you believe?”

Tim Russert: “Tonight he seemed to find his voice for the Demo­c­ra­tic view of the world.”

Fred Barnes on FNC: “Kerry did very well and we will have a Pres­i­den­tial race from here on out.”

Later: Wow, just fin­ished watch­ing the debate. If it were a box­ing match, the ref would have stopped it out of mercy. We’re back at an even match, with the momen­tum with Kerry.

I think this was Jim Lehrer’s ninth appear­ance as debate mod­er­a­tor. It was his best by far.

My for­mer Sacra­mento Bee com­padre Tim Grieve sizes up the debate in Salon.

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Why did George W. Bush give up his pilot’s license with 2 1/2 years remain­ing in his National Guard duties? The Nation and MyWB17.com report that it was because of a “crip­pling fear of flying.”

Also: Ana­lyz­ing the Bush National Guard doc­u­ments — are they legit after all? Inter­est­ing (though I can’t see any­one bas­ing his or her vote on this.)

Says Bob Fer­tik: “[I]t does PROVE BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT that the Texas Air National Guard had a PROPORTIONAL-SPACED TYPEWRITER in Feb­ru­ary 1971 — one full year before the first “Kil­lian” memo!”

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Quote of the Day from Adam Curry:

“It’s going to get inter­est­ing when iPods are out­lawed and assault rifles are legal.”

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From Thursday’s NY Times Cir­cuits sec­tion: A grow­ing cot­tage indus­try is tak­ing cus­tomers’ raw home video and putting it on DVD, in some cases pro­duc­ing short movies with sophis­ti­cated cin­e­matic effects and a musi­cal soundtrack.

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Op-ed piece in today’s NY Times: How to debate George Bush, by Al Gore.

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I cov­ered eleven up until this one. Every one of them was the most impor­tant elec­tion of a life­time, it was the gen­er­a­tional elec­tion, it was the one that would decide things for the future.

– AP reporter Wal­ter Mears on CNN, Aug. 26

I met Wal­ter Mears at a jour­nal­ism con­ven­tion I put on at Rut­gers in 1981. He was an arro­gant jack­ass then, when he was lord of the Wash­ing­ton press corps, and looks like noth­ing much has changed.

Jay Rosen has a good take on Every Four Years Jour­nal­ism at Press­Think. He cites a writer for Cam­paign Desk who wrote in May:

With a vari­ety of Inter­net research tools read­ily at hand, it has never been eas­ier for reporters to draw an inde­pen­dent assess­ment on any given day of who is right, who is wrong, and in what way. The bot­tom line on this kind of report­ing doesn’t have to be Spin­meis­ters, 1, Accu­racy, 0.

Writes Jay: “Every Four Years has been a way for the polit­i­cal press to go on pre­tend­ing. It pre­tends that “spin” is still a man­age­able thing, when in fact the prac­tice of spin has out­run the capac­ity of jour­nal­ists to do any­thing about it, until they change oper­at­ing sys­tems. This week the press will be telling us a lot about the post-debate spin war and what a key fac­tor that is on Thurs­day night in Miami– and over the week­end. Jour­nal­ists are enablers in this war, but it doesn’t have to be so.”

Also new on Press­Think tonight: Nagourney’s Chal­lenge: Quit Spin Alley

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On tonight’s Daily Show:

Jon Stew­art: Can you seri­ously talk about what’s really going to hap­pen at the debate tomorrow?

Ed Helms: Oh-kay. This is the report I’m going to file. ‘The two can­di­dates exchanged pointed barbs about our Iraq pol­icy and the war on ter­ror. Sen. Kerry made strides toward shed­ding what some of his ana­lysts call a patri­cian image, yadda yadda yadda. But the pres­i­dent, by his plain­spo­ken words, was more effec­tive in com­mu­ni­cat­ing his vision by –’

Stew­art: Ed, I’m sorry. You’ve writ­ten your report as though it’s already hap­pened. This is –

Helms: I wrote it yesterday.

Stew­art: You write your sto­ries in advance, and just put it in the past tense?

Helms: Yea-ahh. We all do. That’s — all the reporters do that.

Stew­art: Why?

Helms: We write the nar­ra­tives in advance based on con­ven­tional wis­dom, and what­ever hap­pens we make it fit that storyline.

Stew­art: Why?

Helms: We’re lazy? Lazy thinkers?

Stew­art: But what hap­pens if actual news happens?

Helms: That’s what blog­gers are for.

Media crit­i­cism in a nut­shell — sad and true.

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Cal­en­dar of 1089 U.S. mil­i­tary war deaths in Iraq.

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Susan Kitchens headed out to the Mojave Desert to wit­ness the 6 a.m. launch of the Ansari X Prize X1 pri­vate space flight. She has five pages of pho­tos and com­men­tary. Nice job, Susan.

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From today’s San Jose Mer­cury News comes news about an impor­tant mile­stone for Inter­net TV: Akimbo lands Net TV programs.

Time Warner’s Turner Broad­cast­ing Sys­tem will dis­trib­ute some of its best-known shows through Akimbo, a San Mateo start-up that plans to deliver video to tele­vi­sion over the Internet.

The deal, which includes Car­toon Net­work shows, selected CNN news doc­u­men­taries and Turner Clas­sic Movies, rep­re­sents a mile­stone for Akimbo’s fledg­ling technology.

“It’s a big deal,” said Gerry Kaufhold, an ana­lyst for research firm In-Stat/MDR. “It indi­cates that the Akimbo approach of push­ing con­tent from a broad­band Inter­net con­nec­tion to your tele­vi­sion set is start­ing to gain some trac­tion when you start sign­ing up peo­ple like Turner.”

Akimbo seeks to cap­i­tal­ize on the spread of high-speed Inter­net con­nec­tions to deliver to tele­vi­sion sets enter­tain­ment pro­grams now found exclu­sively on the Inter­net, along with inde­pen­dent films, foreign-language pro­grams and other eclec­tic shows.

The Akimbo ser­vice pushes up to 200 hours of films and TV shows to the Akimbo Player, an 80-gigabyte tele­vi­sion set-top box. That way the con­tent is wait­ing for the viewer, on demand. The qual­ity is iden­ti­cal to broad­cast television. …

In-Stat’s Kaufhold said Akimbo might ini­tially appeal to recent col­lege grad­u­ates who grew up watch­ing such pop­u­lar Inter­net indie fare as iFilm. It’s cheaper than pay­ing for dig­i­tal cable and the addi­tion of Turner’s Adult Swim — edgier ani­ma­tion for an older audi­ence — might prove compelling. …

As evi­dence that Akimbo might be onto some­thing, it now has com­pe­ti­tion in the Inter­net video-to-TV mar­ket. An Atlanta start-up called Dave.tv plans to intro­duce a sim­i­lar ser­vice in January.

I spent an hour on the phone yes­ter­day with Alex Cohen, founder of Undergroundfilm.org, another Inter­net con­tent provider whose mate­r­ial will be car­ried by Akimbo.

When our­me­dia launches in a few weeks, we’ll begin think­ing about how to offer con­tent from our servers to Akimbo and other new-breed Inter­net TV services.

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