Current (https://current.org/2006/05/)
Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers, filling in for Charlie Rose, interviews Garrison Keillor and Robert Altman about the film adaptation of A Prairie Home Companion (free Google video).
During a PBS Showcase meeting distinguished by a sense of optimism that public TV had emerged stronger after last year’s political troubles, public TV executives unveiled their plans to make more PBS content available to viewers on demand, to expand children’s programming and pilot new primetime science series. “The digital revolution cannot be ignored. … It is calling us to reinvent ourselves on a seemingly daily basis,” said new PBS President Paula Kerger, during a May 17 speech that opened the conference in Orlando, Fla. “We need to expand the menu of services we offer for the era of ‘my time’ TV,” said WGBH President Henry Becton later that day.
When Bill Moyers took the podium May 17 [2006] at PBS Showcase in Orlando, Fla., he stepped up to accept PBS’s “Be More” Award, an honor recognizing PBS contributors who inspire viewers. His acceptance speech [full text] exhorted public broadcasting itself to be more. He admitted having “optimism of the will,” which means, contrary to the grim view of his reportorial eye, he expects a positive future and gets up every day to bring it about. Pubcasting’s leadership also gives him hope. He knew Paula Kerger at WNET, before she became PBS president.
Consultant Robert Paterson relates the tale of his recent 300-kilometer bike ride and explains how it ties into his work with NPR and public radio. “The leadership job is not to control my bike ride but to provide every biker with the optimal experience that fits them uniquely,” he writes. “Do you offer this to your staff or to your listeners?”
John Sutton proposes a goal for increasing listening to public radio: “By the end of 2010, 75% of all public radio stations will have increased their AQH [average quarter hour] audiences by at least 10 percent over their calendar year 2005 average.”
Seattle’s KUOW-FM will launch a second news/talk service on KXOT-FM in Tacoma starting July 1. The station will carry national news and information programs not already airing on KUOW. KXOT is owned by Public Radio Capital and was previously operated by KEXP-FM, which was unable to keep up payments on the station and let it go dark in January.
Joe Gwathmey is retiring as president of Texas Public Radio in San Antonio. Gwathmey was a member of NPR’s founding board of directors and one of the network’s first employees.
The fate of the Los Angeles area’s second largest pubTV station is up in the air again after a state appeals court on Friday nixed the sale of KOCE to a nonprofit affiliated with the station. The seller, a community college district in Orange County, must either keep the station or put it up for sale again, the Los Angeles Times reported. Selling KOCE to the nonprofit instead of a higher-bidding religious broadcaster was “the rankest form of favoritism,” the court concluded after rehearing the case. Daystar, the religious broadcasting chain, filed a separate suit alleging discrimination. The nonprofit now operating KOCE thought it wrapped up the purchase in October 2003.
Danny and Annie Perasa enjoyed the sort of dream marriage promised in diamond ads and sappy romantic comedies, only it all actually happened. All the laughs, the finished sentences, the little love letters — “glorified weather reports,” Annie called them — that Danny would leave for “my princess” each morning on the kitchen table at home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. All the funny stories. Like the one about Danny, with his monumentally bad eyesight, mistaking a herd of goats in St. Martin for a pack of “really incredible leaping dogs.” Or about the time he befriended a crew of Hells Angels on Long Island, who put him on the back of a chopper and gave him a lift to the train station.
In a speech at Washington’s National Press Club yesterday, PBS President Paula Kerger touted new digital media as a means for public TV to “take our service to a new level.” But “bias was the first topic raised during a question-and-answer session,” reports the Washington Times.
Louisiana’s legislative auditor released a report [PDF file] yesterday that said Louisiana Public Broadcasting, a state-funded public TV network, illegally deposited $11 million over three years in accounts held by its private non-profit, the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting. Leaders of the three boards with oversight over LPB and its fundraising non-profits challenged the auditor’s controversial conclusions. “[W]e will guard jealously every dollar donated to LPB and will not allow it to be diverted for any other purpose,” they said in a statement. “There is not even a hint of allegation that any LPB funds were spent in an inappropriate manner,” said Joe Traigle, chairman of the foundation, in today’s Baton Rouge Advocate.
Pacific Public Radio, operator of KKJZ-FM, the major jazz station in the Los Angeles area, is asking fans to urge license-holding California State University at Long Beach to renew its contract, which expires Aug. 1. The university has asked L.A.’s three other big pubradio stations — KCRW, KUSC and KPCC — plus Stevie Wonder’s Taxi Productions and the incumbent Pacific Public Radio to submit proposals to run KKJZ. Sean Heitkemper, KKJZ’s acting g.m., says the university’s RFP calls for adding “information” to the jazz/blues format and for the university to receive a share of revenues. Frank Sinatra Jr. told the Los Angeles Times that KKJZ is “the last lighthouse in the fog” for straight-ahead jazz on the radio.
Michael Coleman, g.m. at WDET in Detroit, pled no contest to a reduced embezzlement charge Thursday and “faces up to 93 days in jail and $500 fine when he is sentenced June 22,” according to the Ann Arbor News. The charge stemmed from Coleman’s tenure as deputy director of Michigan Public Media, during which he and two colleagues kept Persian rugs, event tickets, a pool table and other donated goods and services for themselves, according to an internal audit by the University of Michigan, the station’s license holder. Coleman has agreed to pay $3500 in restitution to his former employer. WDET will retain him as g.m. despite the plea, station officials say. A no contest plea is not an admission of guilt but is treated as a guilty conviction for sentencing purposes.
Pabst Blue Ribbon, the former bottom-shelf beer that has become a hipster beverage of choice in recent years, is now underwriting NPR’s All Songs Considered, reports the Boston Herald.
The Senate unanimously approved a bill Thursday that would increase FCC radio and television indecency fines tenfold, from $32,500 to $325,000 per offense, reports Multichannel News. A House version would raise naughty word fines to $500,000. Congress has threatened to dramatically raise indecency penalties since Janet Jackson’s breast sparked a furor about broadcast decency standards in 2004, but the two houses still need to reconcile differences between the bills and pass a final measure before new levels can go into effect.
Text of Bill Moyers’ speech May 18, 2006, at the PBS Showcase Conference, Orlando, Fla. He spoke after PBS gave him its third annual Be More Award. Jump to sections where Moyers:
thanks associates for their part in his work,
tells why the best is yet to come,
recalls discussions in the Johnson White House,
lists what public TV could do for democracy, and
explains why CPB didn’t get stable funding
See also Current’s coverage and full text of the speech. Thank you for this moment. I consider your award the singular honor of my long life in public broadcasting.
Congress doesn’t work that way, said Wilbur Mills, the formidable chair of the House Ways and Means Committee in the late 1960s. Bill Moyers, then a young aide to President Johnson, recalled the upshot of the Public Broadcasting Act: Congress created CPB but left it without a dedicated revenue source, destined to lobby unceasingly for annual appropriations. This account is excerpted from Moyers’ speech to the PBS Showcase Conference in May 2006. (The full text of the speech is also on this site.)
… When he signed it, the President said that the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 “announces to the world that our nation wants more than just material wealth; our nation wants more than ‘a chicken in every pot.’ We in America have an appetite for excellence, too….
A Sacramento Bee media columnist stares in the face of extreme boredom without flinching: he listens to almost all of Capital Public Radio’s pledge drive and writes about the experience. “Oh, it’s all there: intriguing suspense, riotous humor, wrenching pathos and pure spoken-word poetry,” he says. “It’s a wonder that the Peabody Award judges have yet to recognize the genius of the KXJZ (88.9 FM) pledge drive.”
Wired summarizes last weekend’s Beyond Broadcast conference. “I think we’re at a very strange point of all these enormously powerful, old, rich institutions — the great brand names of the business — dying in front of our eyes. And they won’t pick up the clue phone,” says Christopher Lydon, host of public radio’s Open Source.
NPR Ombdusman Jeffrey Dvorkin examines a recent blog-induced foofaraw regarding Mara Liasson and Fox News and concludes: “These blogs appear to be making our public life even more crude and vulgar than it has been up to now.” (UPDATE: Media Matters, one of Dvorkin’s culprits, responds.)