Quick Takes
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Mixed Bag Classic, a triple-A format radio show hosted by freeform radio veteran Pete Fornatale, is entering national distribution.
Quick Takes
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LA Magazine profiles NPR host Tavis Smiley and writes up the network’s West Coast expansion: “The network has looked at Los Angeles the way characters do in Woody Allen movies—we’re the wacky outpost where trends come from and where Hollywood rules all,” writes RJ Smith. “We make the folks in D.C. feel that much better about themselves.”
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Longtime critic of liberal bias at PBS, David Horowitz, has sued conservative producer Lionel Chetwynd (National Desk and the recent Darkness at High Noon) for kicking him off the board of Chetwynd’s production company, Whidbey Island Films, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Horowitz says PBS pressured Chetwynd to oust him.
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A sober Muppet story: The New York Times reports that the Palestinian-Israeli-Jordanian version of Sesame Street has had to give up the idea that Muppets of all nationalities can meet as friends on a single street.
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Hostile TV critics grilled PBS on its treatment of Louis Rukeyser, its handling of the HIV-positive Muppet flap, and antiquated scheduling strategies during a July 26 executive session in Pasadena.
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WFDD-FM in Winston-Salem, N.C., has dropped its broadcast of Sunday sermons and Baptist church services, according to the Winston-Salem Journal. “The loss is a great one,” wrote a Journal columnist. The broadcasts threatened WFDD’s receipt of an NTIA grant in 1995.
Quick Takes
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A janitor at New York’s WNYC-FM/AM stole a list of donors and sold it to an identity-theft ring, according to The New York Times.
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Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, a D.C.-based advocate for minority ownership and employment in media, announced that it has launched a website, www.mmtconline.org. Former FCC member Henry Rivera is chairman and David Honig is executive director.
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NABET-CWA has posted a fact sheet about its new contract with NPR. (See July 23 entry, below.)
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Though nominally about religious broadcasting, the Christian Community Broadcasters’ website features regular updates about the FCC’s dispensation of low-power FM licenses.
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British broadcasters are pushing digital radio enthusiastically, though there are few affordable sets in the stores, WNYC’s On the Media reported.
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Leo McKern, whose Rumpole of the Bailey performances were produced in Britain between 1975 and 1992 and aired successfully on PBS, died at the age of 82, according to a New York Times obit.
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More from Louis Rukeyser: I lost interest in Maryland Public TV when they ambushed me, he tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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NPR technicians will vote Aug. 12 on a new union contract, the product of six months of negotiations. The National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, which represents about 80 NPR techies, won some concessions from NPR on raises and jurisdictional issues, but not enough to endorse the contract, according to NABET-CWA staff rep Paula Olson. Technicians overwhelmingly defeated an earlier contract in January.
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Of the networks, PBS had the most news Emmy nominations this year, Reuters reports on Yahoo.com.
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Showtime cable network will docu-dramatize the saga of preteen reporters LeAlan and Lloyd Newman—Chicago kids who teamed with pubradio’s David Isay and Gary Covino to sweep the awards with “Ghetto Life 101” in 1993 and “Remorse” in 1996. Our America comes to cable July 28, 30 and Aug. 2. [Current coverage of “Remorse.”]
Programs/Content
Friction and smoke at Whiteriver
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The internecine warfare at KNNB, the public radio station on the White Mountain Apache reservation in east central Arizona, seems insignificant now, dwarfed by the terrifying Chediski-Rodeo wildfire that roared through the beautiful forests in June. The fire, which destroyed hundreds of homes in Arizona, blackened nearly a third of the 1.6 million-acre Fort Apache Reservation, burning Ponderosa pine destined for the tribe’s sawmills and killing the elk and deer that bring it at least $600,000 a year in hunting licenses. Before the fire, the 20-year-old station in Whiteriver was a focal point of power struggles among factions and tribal leaders. But when the largest wildfire in Arizona history struck the reservation, Apaches put aside those disputes and KNNB focused on essentials: telling listeners how to survive and how to help. They interrupted regular programming with evacuation orders, emergency plans and information about relief and rescue efforts for the more than 20,000 residents in KNNB’s broadcast area.
Quick Takes
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Radio World profiles technology at KUSC in Los Angeles and covers NPR’s recent reorganizing of its cultural programming departments.