Maryland Public Television’s recent announcement of its plans to begin multicasting V-me, pubTV’s new Spanish-language digital channel, came under fire from Republican State Delegate Pat McDonough. During a recent talk radio appearance, McDonough accused MPT leaders of adding the service as political payback for Hispanic supporters of Maryland’s new Democratic governor, Martin O’Malley. In an editorial published today, the Baltimore Sun described the complainers as “know-nothing critics.”

As Latino interest groups and politicians took their complaints about Ken Burns’ The War to corporate sponsors last week, top execs from pubcasting’s G-4 signed a joint statement on CPB’s role in protecting public TV and radio from political interference in program content. “[A]ny attempt by the government or interest groups to influence content, especially before a program has aired, raises serious Constitutional, statutory and policy concerns…,” wrote leaders of CPB, PBS, APTS and NPR. “[A]s we reaffirm our commitment to the mission of public broadcasting at its 40th anniversary, we urge Congress not to forsake this ideal.”

PBS and its star filmmaker Ken Burns “have just been mugged by censors and pressure groups demanding changes” to The War, writes National Review Online columnist Garrett Moewe, and the silence from pubTV’s “self-appointed protectors” on the left is deafening.

Phil Rosenthal reported in the Chicago Tribune that the Showtime cable net has ordered an additional six-episode run of the TV spinoff of PRI’s This American Life. (That’s all Rosenthal writes, so don’t bother registering for more.) With the first run, more than a few critics, including AP’s Frazier Moore, gave fans the good news that Ira Glass and company had succeeded in developing a visual version that lives up to the aural original.

PBS announced today that it picked Wired Science as the winner of its science pilot competition (see Current‘s story in advance of the announcement). The breezy 10-week series, produced by Los Angeles’ KCET and Wired magazine, will debut Oct. 3.

U.S. Rep Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Donald Manzullo (R-Ill.) introduced a bill that aims to throw out a controversial new royalty structure for music streams, passed in March by a panel of three copyright judges, that many webcasters say will put them out of business if it goes into effect. Webcasters support the lawmakers’ measure, which would set rates at 7.5 percent of streaming-based revenue–or roughly the same level as those for satellite radio–instead of basing the rate on the annually escalating, per-play standard that the record labels wanted and the judges decreed. Internet radio station operators have been bombarding Congress with pleas to intervene, an effort that became more urgent earlier this month after the copyright panel rejected all requests to reconsider its decision.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler thought several of the America at a Crossroads films were excellent and described one in particular, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, as “one of the most gripping hours I’ve spent in front of the tube in quite a while.” But he also agreed with critics and viewers who blasted PBS for giving an hour to neocon adviser Richard Perle during the series. The decision to re-present the initial case for a war “that has, at the very least, gone badly” instead of examining what went wrong and where the powers that be should go from here represents a “stunning avoidance of the real crossroad that we are at,” Getler wrote.

Alison Stewart, host of MSNBC’s midday news show The Most, will co-host of an “upcoming 24-hour multimedia news service and morning drive show for Adults 25-44,” NPR announced today. The new show is working-titled the Bryant Park Project, now in a “Rough Cuts” blogging phase. Her new colleagues have posted a musical video tribute to Stewart. Before joining MSNBC in 2003, she anchored for ABC News, reported for CBS Sunday Morning and other shows and won a Peabody for MTV News election coverage. ‘Bistro says Stewart was music director of Brown University’s commercial college station, WBRU, when she was a student.

Detroit Public Television said yesterday that Steve Antoniotti, its president since 1995, “tendered his resignation because of an acknowledged failure to comply with station requirements, unrelated to financial matters.” Chief Operating Officer Dan Alpert will serve as interim g.m. The board chairman declined to discuss what those requirements were, the Detroit Free Press reported today.

The producers behind Islam vs. Islamists–the America at a Crossroads doc that PBS says it will not air in its current imbalanced state–will show the film to journalists and lawmakers at a series of invitation-only screenings in Washington, according to the Washington Times.

Jazz announcers Chuck Cecil and Helen Borgers stayed on the air at KKJZ in Long Beach, Calif., when Mt. Wilson Broadcasters took over operation of the station April 21, the Orange County Register reported. But others, including Joni Caryl and Scott Willis, lost their gigs. On the same day, listeners of KUOR-FM in Redlands, east of Los Angeles, lost jazz programming entirely when its licensee, the University of Redlands, took the occasion to drop its KKJZ simulcast and picked up Southern California Public Radio’s all-news service, repeated from KPCC in Pasadena, the Redlands Daily Facts said. SCPR plans to launch a news bureau at the Redlands site.

Like many newspaper commentators, Arizona Republic‘s Robert Robb found inspiration for a column in what he heard on NPR, or saw on its website, in this case: The painful-to-read profiles of the Virginia Tech victims. He wrote: “So many lives of promise. I was holding it together until I came to Henry Lee, a computer engineering freshman at Virginia Tech. Lee moved to the United States from China as a child and entered elementary school here not speaking English. He nevertheless became his high school salutatorian. He was, however, reluctant to speak at his graduation ceremony, but was talked into it.

Two public broadcasters active in southern California during the 1960s and 1970s, James Lee Mathes and Fred Burgess, retired to Kansas together in the 1980s. They died within seven months in 2007. James Lee Mathes James Lee Mathes, 73, a pioneer in public TV at KCET and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, died March 27 [2007] in his home state, Kansas. He had pancreatic cancer. Mathes worked on such KCET projects as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series and an eight-nation simulcast, as well as fundraising and general administration. Before joining KCET in the late 1960s, Mathes produced and directed educational TV programs at USC.

Ernest James Wilson III, a CPB Board member, was named dean of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication on Thursday, the USC Daily Trojan reported. He is a visiting professor of public diplomacy at Annenberg and a faculty member at the University of Maryland. He succeeds Geoffrey Cowan, who was also a Democratic member of the CPB Board.

Register and vote by April 27 for the annual Webby People’s Voice Awards. Nominees connected with public TV and radio include: PBS Kids Sprout cable channel’s Sprout Diner in Family/Parenting; NPR.org in News and in Radio; the NPR Podcast Directory in Podcasts; Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly in Religion; NPR’s This I Believe in Religion; Nova scienceNow in Science; P.O.V. in Television; and Curious George in Youth. The public chooses the People’s Voice Awards, while the 500-plus members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences choose the Webby Award winners in a parallel competition. Both sets will be announced in June.