The Peg + Cat album: Everybody sing along to “I Like Circles ’cause They’re Round”! (Image: PBS)
• PBS released an album this week, PBS Kids Presents: Peg and Cat’s Really Big Album, with 22 tunes from the preschool series Peg + Cat. The songs, designed to help teach math and problem solving, include “100 Is One Zero Zero” and the ever-popular “Sorty Sort Sort.” It’s available through iTunes, Amazon and Google Play.
• Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney will be the Guggenheim Honoree at this year’s AFI Docs festival in Washington, D.C., the festival announced May 1. Gibney’s evening at the festival, June 20, will include a Q&A alongside clips from his films. Gibney won an Oscar for his 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side and reportedly ruffled feathers at WNET with his 2012 Independent Lens film “Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream,” which included criticism of conservative billionaire and former WNET board member David Koch.
• “Public Radio Is For Moochers.” So reads the title of a recent post on Reason.com, the online home of Reason, a magazine with a libertarian bent. Yet it’s not a swipe at pubradio, but a call for listeners to do better at supporting a service they enjoy. Okay, Reason does get in a swipe in at public radio station pledge drives, likening them to “Chinese water torture” that reduces “even hardened commandos” to “blubbering, mucus-snuffling wrecks begging someone to make it stop.”
• While the Pacifica Foundation is embroiled in legal infighting, as board members sue each other over the firing of former Executive Director Summer Reese, the network now faces another legal action. National temp agency Robert Half International Inc. sued in Alameda County, Calif., court April 4 over $31,802 plus legal fees and interest for unpaid bills.