Current (https://current.org/2004/05/)
First Broadcasting, a commercial radio group, is petitioning the FCC to change its procedures for licensing stations. Some of the changes, if adopted, would affect public radio, including how the agency handles vacant allotments and community-of-license switches.
PBS President Pat Mitchell is one of three candidates for chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America named in a New York Times report. MPAA has found it hard to find a successor for Jack Valenti.
Lori Robertson of American Journalism Review chews over threats to depth and innovation at NPR News as the network adds hours of news programming for reporters to fill. When asked to file for three shows in a day, Nina Totenberg recalls replying: “If you want me to know anything for me to report, you have to leave me alone for a few hours to do it.”
After a year of operating a transmitter in Sacramento, San Francisco’s KQED has a weekly cume of just 19,000, while the local pubradio station, KXJZ, has 140,000 — up 3,000 from last year, the Sacramento Bee reported. The Bay Area station competes head-on with KXJZ, running Morning Edition, TOTN, ATC and Marketplace at the same times (with one half-hour discrepancy).
Sounds like the Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary is now in beta release, for pubcasters who want to try digital asset management. [Text of the dictionary’s present version. Earlier Current article.] Panelists from all corners of pubcasting looked at the alpha version in February during a comment period. Now the CPB-funded dictionary of metadata terms is being tested. Version 1.0 is due out in the fall.
Does NPR have a liberal bias? Hardly, according to lefty media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. In its study of NPR signature programming, FAIR found the network’s partisan sources are more likely to be Republican. The study titled “How Public is Public Radio?” also claims NPR “relies on the same elite and influential sources that dominate mainstream commercial news, and falls short of reflecting the diversity of the American public.”
“I intend to become much more of an advocate for public broadcasting than when I am on the air and seem to be acting in self-interest.” In a Texas Monthly interview, Bill Moyers discusses the price public broadcasting pays for federal funding and what he intends to do about it.
Bob Edwards, back in D.C. in a break from his book tour, said NPR bosses didn’t give him the option of co-hosting the show before they reassigned him [RealAudio file.]. “I was never asked to be a co-host, I was never told I would have a co-host. None of that came up,” Edwards said on Diane Rehm’s talk show May 21. Program chief Jay Kernis has said NPR wanted two hosts for the show that Edwards hosted alone. He said he will remain at NPR “for the time being,” but owes it to himself and his family to review “attractive options” offered by others.
A long-anticipated report on public television by the General Accounting
Office, released May 21, advises Congress that CPB illegally diverted
money intended for stations into the now-defunct Television Future Fund. The report, “Issues Related to Federal Funding of Public Television by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” says CPB operated outside its authority
when it took money from the part of its appropriation that Congress designated
for station grants and used it for Television Future Fund projects. Between 1996 and this year, the Future Fund made grants for R&D projects
to improve public TV operations and fundraising. But GAO said CPB can’t legally
make selective grants from funds allocated for station grants. CPB President Bob Coonrod rebutted that conclusion in a statement printed
as an appendix in the report.
At a feel-good press conference May 13, all parties hailed the resolution of a decade-long fight over the tower of Fordham University’s WFUV-FM in New York City.The Daily News likened the scene to a Rose Garden peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. Even Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a joint news release endorsing Montefiore Medical Center’s offer to put the antenna atop its residential building. The new site is one-and-a-half miles from the scene of the station’s festering dispute with the nearby New York Botanical Garden, which says the present tower spoils the surroundings. Ralph Jennings, WFUV’s g.m., is saving his big hooray for the day when the station starts transmitting from the new tower. With its new antenna nearly 500 feet above average terrain and radiating 50 kilowatts of power, the station will reach farther into Brooklyn, Westchester County and Connecticut, instantly doubling its potential audience to more than 13 million.
In the New York Daily News, WNYC talk show host Brian Lehrer relates a tale of being abruptly cut off during an interview with Meet the Press host Tim Russert. Two days later, Russert found that what goes around comes around.
Continuing her 70-city tour, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman explained in a Washington Post online chat why she recently interviewed sources familiar with the Palestinian refugees’ situation: “Our role as journalists is to go where the silence is.”
Bill McGinley, g.m. of WOI Radio in Ames, Iowa, tells the Ames Tribune that Iowa is nearing the point at which a statewide public radio network would make sense.
The Washington Post profiles Transom.org, which recently became the first stand-alone website to win a Peabody.
“Real diversity. Real public television” is the slogan for Philadelphia’s maverick public TV station WYBE, and the phrase could be a précis of General Manager Sherri Hope Culver’s article in Television Quarterly, posted on the station’s site. (Beware — it’s a long PDF download.) Not a member of PBS, the station specializes in underserved minorities and is guided in part by 12 ethnic councils.
The New York Times reports on newlyweds who met through a fund drive on WAMC-FM in Albany.
Minnesota Public Radio violated its conflict-of-interest policy when it bought a mansion to resell earlier this year, reports the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.
Democracy Now! host and touring author Amy Goodwin criticizes mainstream media’s “access of evil” in this Newsweek Q-and-A. (via msnbc.com)
“Does anyone in public TV realize that people have lives?” Kansas City Star critic Aaron Barnhart faults PBS’s scheduling of Colonial House as a marathon viewing experience.