Current (https://current.org/2002/07/page/2/)
Frontline producer Ofra Bikel recently spoke with NPR about the importance of media access to prisoners. (RealAudio.) Another Frontliner, Lowell Bergman, tells MSNBC.com that the media, swept up in the glitz of the late-90s New Economy, handled business titans with kid gloves. “I can’t remember any billionaire who was criticized on 60 Minutes,” he says. “Robert Maxwell, Donald Trump, Leona Helmsley, Jack Welch—they all got positive stories.”
Now that he’s retiring, Ron Hull has time to find out who he is. Not that he or anyone else in public TV is uncertain on that point. Hull is one of the field’s most prominent advocates for good programs and a memorable character who flips his tie over his shoulder when he gets excited, which is often. He worked most of 47 years at the University of Nebraska’s public TV network, leaving periodically and coming back again to its program side, which he tended while Jack McBride built the transmitters, the relationships and an array of ambitious projects based in Lincoln. Hull is retiring from half-time work at the university this month, but his to-do list is full: dedicating a study center for Nebraska author Mari Sandoz at Chadron State College, raising a million bucks for the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Commission celebration in 2004, and tracking down who his parents were.
This summer public radio will get a taste of an impending change in the technological status quo: the Content Depot. This far-reaching set of upgrades and innovations in the field’s means for moving audio around the country will streamline how producers and stations select, send, acquire and automate programming. In particular, the Content Depot standardizes how the NPR-operated Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS) stores programming and feeds it to stations. Today the process relies on a hodgepodge of media on both ends of the transfer. PRSS stores programming in forms including analog tape and compact disc, while stations download it from a PRSS satellite and save it on hard drives and other media before broadcasting it.
Frontline won the Television Critics Association’s news and information award this year, Zap2It.com reported.
After trying for seven years, Pittsburgh’s WQED won FCC approval July 18 to sell its second public TV channel and raise money to get out of debt and go digital, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. [PDF file of FCC decision.] Diane Sutter, the broadcaster who will pay $20 million for the UHF channel, said in the Tribune-Review that the win was an example of persistence paying off. Jerry Starr, longtime opponent of the sale, said his group had not decided whether to appeal. [Current article about WQED’s 2001 petition for dereservation]
Don’t stick your mic in the turtle’s butt. That and other bits of advice from NPR reporter John Burnett are intended for radio journalists, but many apply to other media as well.
The new hosts of Wall Street Week lack the stage presence and rigor of Louis Rukeyser, even though the veteran host’s delivery on CNBC is stodgy and predictable, writes Slate’s reviewer. The Wall Street Journal’s critic says the new WSW is “achingly dull–rather like a dinner made up only of broccoli and undressed arugula.”
Chicago’s WBEZ might assume management of Loyola University’s WLUW, according to a Sun-Times report.
Sesame Street plans to introduce an HIV-positive Muppet character to the cast of its South African program and is discussing a similar move in the U.S., the Washington Post reports. Current earlier reported on other big changes made to the U.S. show.
Folks at the community weblog MetaFilter are discussing the NPR anthrax story muddle, with a Fox News report as a starting point.
A Pennsylvania court sentenced appraiser/dealer Russell Pritchard to a year in jail and repayment of $830K defrauded through his appearances on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow, the New York Times reported (second item). [Earlier Current articles on his firing by WGBH in 2000 and indictment in 2001.]
At July 10’s House hearing, NPR President Kevin Klose offered his personal and professional apology to the Traditional Values Coalition for a news segment that linked the Christian organization to the anthrax investigation, Variety reports (see Current’s earlier report on the flap).
Read a suite of dispatches from a conference on public radio talk shows, held in April.
A New York Times critic lauds tonight’s report from Iraq by Gwynne Roberts as “the timeliest possible beginning to Wide Angle,” a new PBS foreign affairs series. [The program’s website.]
The L.A. Times profiles public radio’s Studio 360, which host Kurt Andersen says goes beyond high culture to show us the art “on TV and in our bathrooms.” [Current profiled the show last summer.]
Staci Kramer of the Online Journalism Review supports NPR’s new linking policy—with a few reservations. [Read the Current story about the debate.]
LA Times critic Howard Rosenberg describes PBS’s American Family as the best of television’s new Latino family dramas: “It’s rich and atmospheric, witty and a major tug on your heartstrings, all with no trace of phoniness. Your loss if you’re missing it.”
The conflict between NPR and the Traditional Values Coalition is on the agenda of the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing today at 10 on Capitol Hill. [Current report on the affair.] It’s unlikely the committee will avoid the topic with both Andrea Lafferty of the conservative group and NPR President Kevin Klose as witnesses. Also up: the heads of CPB, PBS, APTS, WNYC and cable exec Michael Willner of Insight Communications, who has in the past objected to extensive DTV carriage demands by broadcasters.
Ken Burns brags the sound will be so good on the forthcoming digitally remastered version of The Civil War that “when you see Pickett’s Charge, it will rearrange your molecules,” he told Gail Shister of the Philadelphia Inquirer. His next bio topics: Horatio Nelson Jackson, who won a bet in 1903 by driving coast to coast in less than 90 days (voice by Tom Hanks) and boxing champ Jack Johnson (voice by Samuel Jackson).
The secretary of Pacifica’s board has asked the network to renegotiate its freshly-inked contract with the show Democracy Now!. Carol Spooner alleges that the contract, which establishes Democracy Now! as a self-owned production company independent from Pacifica, was signed prematurely and could hurt the network financially.