A recent This American Life segment about Africa (RealAudio) dismayed a blogger with experience in the country. “In the only story in 2005 I can recall that mentioned Africa, you . . . managed to reinforce the majority of stupid Africa stereotypes I’ve encountered in 12 years of working on African issues and periodically living on the continent.”

The title character of The Teachings of Jon is a middle-aged North Carolina man with Down syndrome who has an IQ of 20, can’t speak and has a job that pulls in 27 cents a week. “But my film is not about Down syndrome at all,” says Jennifer Owensby, producer, director — and Jon’s younger sister. She says the documentary is not really about Jon, either. “My brother can’t be the main character because my brother never changes. It’s my family and the audience as they’re watching who become the main character.” The Teachings of Jon offers an entertaining short course on family values, albeit as embodied by a somewhat unorthodox family.

In a farewell delivered on the final installment of PBS’s Journal Editorial Report, Paul Gigot thanked his producers, former CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson and viewers. “To the many PBS stations that carried us around the country, thank you for your commitment to public affairs programming that represents more than one point of view,” Gigot said. “We wish every station shared that commitment.”

In his first column as PBS ombudsman, Michael Getler faults PBS and producers of Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories for a “flawed presentation.” He writes: “There was a complete absence of some of the fundamental journalistic conventions that, in fact, make a story more powerful and convincing because they, at a minimum, acknowledge that there is another side.”

New York’s WNYE-FM is simulcasting music programming from XM Satellite Radio, reports Radio and Records. (Via DCRTV.)

Fox News Channel announced that it will add the Journal Editorial Report to its lineup in January. Developed for PBS, the show has been at the heart of the Kenneth Tomlinson balance controversy. It will appear on PBS for the last time Dec. 2. “Roger Ailes and the Fox News Channel team have proven they can attract viewers with serious news programming and commentary,” said Paul Gigot, the show’s host and editorial page editor for the Wall Street Journal. “I look forward to working with them to make the Journal Editorial Report part of their successful lineup.”

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.

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.”

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.

WFMU’s blog links to a video of Barney “channeling Tupac Shakur.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.)

In a feature at Poynter.org, NPR’s Bill Marimow and Daniel Zwerdling share stories of how their work has made a difference.