A New York Times feature contrasts next week’s PBS doc, Country Boys, with predictable accounts of the poverty cycle. “Everyone wants things to be all black and white, but with me everything is nuance,” Sutherland says. Shot in 1999-01, the project debuts Jan. 9 on Frontline. The filmmaker estimates it’s “a half-million dollars over budget, and two and a half years late.” Current profiled the project and two other Appalachian doc series in 2004. Sutherland is known for the earlier observational doc, The Farmer’s Wife, aired in 1998. Sutherland says he still gets 30 e-mails a week about that series.

Seven listeners have sued Detroit pubradio station WDET for fraud, claiming they were tricked into pledging for a music-oriented station in October while management was planning to switch its daytime schedule to national news programming, the Detroit Free Press reported. The change took place Dec. 13. The worst time to make such a switch is after a pledge drive, commented Chicago Public Radio’s Torey Malatia, quoted in the Chicago Tribune. Via Romenesko.

StoryCorps, the oral history project launched by pubradio producer David Isay, has announced 2006 stops for its two traveling audio studios. One MobileBooth visited Gulfport, Miss., earlier this month and the other will come to New Orleans in May. The project has taped nearly 2,000 personal stories in 26 cities so far. Booths also operate at Grand Central Terminal and the World Trade Center in Manhattan.

The bones of former Masterpiece Theater host Alistair Cooke were illegally sold after his death, reports the New York Times. “At this point, we’re just reeling,” said his daughter. “It’s so horrific on so many fronts.”

NPR’s reporting is less liberal than critics charge, and The Newshour with Jim Lehrer hews close to the political center, according to a forthcoming study of media bias led by a political scientist at the University of California Los Angeles.

“I believe NPR relies too much on think tanks in general and on conservative think tanks in particular — especially when it comes to economics, and defense policy issues,” writes NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin, clarifying views expressed in his previous column.

The format change at Detroit’s WDET-FM is “a very risky move,” says former General Manager Caryn Mathes in the Detroit Metro Times.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler faults producers of Now for their handling of a Nov. 18 field report about wages paid to Latino electricians hired for reconstruction work in New Orleans. Complaints about the report from BE&K Inc., the subcontractor whose wage and hiring practices were examined, and the producer’s response are posted on Now‘s website.

Meanwhile, CPB Ombudsman Ken Bode faults Getler for being too easy on PBS and producers of Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories in Getler’s Dec. 2 critique.

Students at Swarthmore College and pubradio veteran Marty Goldensohn are producing War News Radio, a show about Iraq reported entirely from stateside. “We thought we were at a disadvantage not being on the ground in Iraq,” a student tells The New Yorker. “But when you hear from reporters there that they can’t even leave their hotels you start to think.”

Robert Krulwich is returning to NPR. “My feeling has always been that there’s a kind of imprinting going on if you do journalism and broadcasting for a living,” he says. “Like if you’re a duck and the first thing you see is a duck. I imprinted on NPR — it’s the duck I know and the duck I own, and I’m going back to my original duck.”

Bring out your dead, practice your silly walks, and steel yourselves for something completely different, yet strangely familiar. PBS is launching a video onslaught of Monty Python humor—the classics as well as the humorists’ annotated favorites and an acclaimed sequel of sorts. PBS has scheduled Monty Python’s Personal Best, a pastiche of new material and clips from the TV series and movies, for Feb. 22, March 1 and 8. Separately, PBS will release all the naughty bits — the 45 original 30-minute episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus — this spring. And Fawlty Towers Revisited, a pledge special celebrating the comedy starring Python John Cleese as the world’s least hospitable hotelier, has been available to SIP (Station Independence Program) stations since early December.

Peter Sagal tells Chicagoist how he became host of Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!: “[L]ike a lot of public radio geeks, I would sit around saying, ‘I could do that. Why don’t they put me on the air? I can be pompous just as they can! What’s the problem here? What do they have that I don’t?'”

Bill Moyers shares his side of a “sordid little story” about Kenneth Tomlinson, Paul Gigot, and the ideological battle over Now.

A well-connected panel of business leaders, broadcasters and policy wonks last week got specific about what public broadcasting could do in the future to use its digital signals for the greatest public benefit—and to justify the increased funding that would make it possible. ¶ The Digital Future Initiative panel, convened by PBS President Pat Mitchell a year ago, released its report Dec. 15...