Quick Takes
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Humorist Andy Borowitz imagines that President Bush considered bombing NPR in advance of the Iraq War until British Prime Minister Tony Blair talked him out of it.
Quick Takes
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CPB Ombudsman Ken Bode responds to criticisms of the PBS program Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories, “[T]his broadcast is so slanted as to raise suspicions that either the family courts of America have gone crazy or there must be another side to the story.”
Quick Takes
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Online Journalism Review’s Mark Glaser examines NPR’s podcasting strategy and, in a signoff from OJR, notes that he’s working with PBS.org.
Quick Takes
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Nova’s recent special on New Orleans, The Storm that Drowned a City, was too easy on the Bush administration, writes author Paul Loeb in a WorkingForChange critique.
Quick Takes
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“China is a singularly difficult story to tell because there is SO MUCH good and SO MUCH bad all happening simultaneously,” says Rob Gifford, who covers China for NPR, in an interview with Leonard Witt.
Quick Takes
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In the New York Times today and the Washington Post yesterday editorialists derided former CPB Chair Ken Tomlinson — in the Times as a “disastrous zealot” and in the Post as “a triumph of ‘politics over good judgment'”. They followed similar views published in the Toledo Blade and elsewhere. Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, however, said the true scandal is that taxpayers are “conscripted” to pay for media.
Quick Takes
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NPR’s Anne Garrels tells the Hartford Courant about traveling with a company of Marines in Iraq: “[T]hey were so disappointed that I was NPR. They didn’t know what NPR was, but they wanted Fox!” (Via Romenesko.)
Quick Takes
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In a feature at Poynter.org, NPR’s Bill Marimow and Daniel Zwerdling share stories of how their work has made a difference.
Quick Takes
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The future of KUT-FM in Austin, Texas, includes a major fundraising effort and the possibility of a different relationship to its university parent, reports the Austin Chronicle.
Quick Takes
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The New York Times checks in with a high school radio station in Indianapolis whose license was challenged by a religious broadcaster. Dozens of stations around the country have faced similar challenges in recent years.
Quick Takes
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Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories, a PBS documentary about domestic abuse, has come under a withering blogosphere attack for unfairly vilifying fathers. Men’s advocacy groups and experts co-signed a letter to PBS challenging the film’s journalistic rigor and one of the fathers named in the film threatened to sue for libel. Op-eds published by Fox News and the Boston Globe this week comment on the controversy. Glenn Sacks, a columnist and advocate for men’s rights, leads the e-mail campaign, and has published court documents that paint a different picture of a mother portrayed heroicly in Breaking the Silence. (The daughter caught in the middle of this, Fatima Loeliger, posted her response here.) HoustonPBS produced a special edition of The Connection to examine the issues raised in the documentary.
People
Democrats suggest ex-Sen. Pryor for one of the two CPB Board vacancies
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The Senate Democratic leadership has asked the White House to appoint a Senate alumnus, David H. Pryor of Arkansas, to one of the two vacancies on the nine-seat CPB Board. The former senator is dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Pryor would fill a long-vacant seat reserved for a non-Republican under a provision of the Public Broadcasting Act that requires the CPB Board to be bipartisan. The Bush administration refused to nominate an earlier Democratic candidate for the seat, media studies professor Chon Noriega. The other vacant seat probably would be filled by a Republican.
Quick Takes
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“I just think that Ira and radio are too perfect a fit to be applied to television very effectively,” says Robert Siegel of This American Life’s Ira Glass. “But I’d be happy to be proved wrong.”
Quick Takes
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Glenn Mitchell, a talk show host and 30-year veteran of KERA-FM in Dallas, Texas, died Sunday morning at the age of 55.
System/Policy
CPB inspector to investigate whether stations broke law in self-defense
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CPB Inspector General Kenneth A. Konz says he will open an inquiry into whether public TV and radio stations used federal funds to urge listeners and viewers to lobby Congress in response to last summer’s proposed funding cuts.The investigation, first reported by Bloomberg News, was requested in August by 18 Republican lawmakers led by Ginny Brown-Waite (R-Fla.), Konz told Current. The request was in response to stations’ successful campaign in June to rally opposition to $100 million in proposed cuts to CPB’s $400 million appropriation for fiscal 2006. The House restored the full appropriation after pubcasting fans decried the proposed cuts in calls to legislators. Final 2006 budget figures are still pending. Federal law prohibits stations from using CPB funds to lobby Congress.
System/Policy
Tomlinson’s other job: State Dept. looks into his BBG role
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The CPB inspector general’s harshly critical report on Kenneth Tomlinson is not the only scrutiny the former CPB Board chairman is facing. Tomlinson is also under investigation by the State Department Inspector General’s Office for what he’s done as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Meanwhile, two other agencies overseen by the BBG are embroiled in controversies both public and private. The fledgling Arab-language TV channel Alhurra is the subject of three separate government investigations (by the State Department, a House International Relations subcommittee and the Government Accountability Office). And journalists at Voice of America are assailing their BBG-appointed boss for trying to tilt news stories more favorably toward the Bush administration.
Programs/Content
Doc-makers get specific about copyright fair use
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Friday afternoon, things changed for producers who need to use somebody else’s footage and music in their documentaries. Clearing rights may still cost a lot and take too much time, as in the past, but Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi believe producers now have a solid rationale for not paying excessive and confounding fees for copyrighted materials in certain cases. On Nov. 18 [2005], the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, the Independent Documentary Association, public TV’s Independent Television Service and the series P.O.V., and other media groups endorsed a Statement of Best Practices defining four kinds of situations when a producer, under the “fair use” provisions of copyright law, need not pay for a film clip, a shot of a painting or a snatch of music. Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media at American University in Washington, D.C., and Jaszi, an intellectual property expert at the university’s law school, convened groups of experienced filmmakers around the country to look closely at the producers’ (and their lawyers’) working definition of fair use.
CPB
The wreckage: Journal quits with parting shots at public TV
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The same week former CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson resigned from the CPB Board, public TV stations received a low-key announcement that the Wall Street Journal would soon end production of the conservative news analysis series he aggressively championed. Journal Editorial Report, which Tomlinson saw as an antidote to Bill Moyers’ provocative liberal commentaries on Now, will wrap its final PBS program Dec. 2. The controversy over how it came to PBS — especially as details of the process were revealed last week — demonstrated that when politics enters pubTV editorial decisions, none of the players emerges unscathed. Producers for Dow Jones Television, an affiliate of the Journal, initially didn’t explain why they canned the show, but in an unsigned op-ed Nov.
System/Policy
CPB ombuds give minor attention to balance
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Inspector General Kenneth A. Konz found fault with much of former Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson’s balance crusade, but his report did validate the creation of CPB’s ombudsmen, the corporation’s stated tool for dealing with audience concerns about program balance and objectivity. While Konz criticized the unilateral manner in which Tomlinson selected veteran journalists Ken Bode and William Schulz, he concluded that “by expanding the public’s ability to have issues of objectivity and balance addressed,” the addition of ombudsmen was “consistent with” CPB’s responsibilities. “The legislative statute requires that public broadcasting be objective and balanced,” Chair Cheryl Halpern told reporters in September. “The ombudsmen were put in place to [help] CPB function within the constraints of the legislation.” But more than six months after CPB engaged Bode and Schulz to assess program balance and objectivity and handle complaints, they have seldom written on these issues in general terms and not once have they responded to audience concerns about the balance and objectivity of specific programs.
When CPB set the ombudsmen to work, Tomlinson told Current they would review news content, but many of their reports have focused on cultural documentaries that aren’t particularly journalistic, such as No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest of Sounds, and The Appalachians. Of the nine reports filed by the part-time monitors since April 26, three praised public TV docs, two were on NPR news reports from Iraq (Bode did note that the reports “gave a nuanced and balanced view”), one lauded Mississippi PTV for covering a high-profile trial, and one was an “ombudsman operating manual.”
The remaining two mentioned audience concerns about balance issues but only one — Bode’s Sept.