The organizer of the “Save Bob!” petition is now urging Bob’s backers to boycott NPR underwriters. He also wants them to ask lawmakers to cut NPR’s funding and limit underwriting credit language. Columnist Ellen Goodman calls Edwards’ removal a “wake-up call” to an aging America. Another columnist says NPR “is acting like any other big, powerful, dumb, clumsy, unfeeling, implacable, stonewalling, soulless bureaucracy.” And at KUER-FM in Salt Lake City, Morning Edition is bringing in half its usual on-air fundraising take.

In letters to listeners posted on their websites, public radio stations are discussing the departure of Bob Edwards from Morning Edition. Jim King, director of WVXU in Cincinnati, is particularly blunt: “…[I]t is impossible for me to convey my own sense of outrage and betrayal by the network we supposedly ‘own’ as member stations.”

“We have listened to a lot of Bob Edwards’ Morning Edition lying down in our beds but we should not take this dismissal from Morning Edition lying down,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in the Senate March 24. (His comments start three paragraphs down on this page.)

Romanesko of Poyntless Online reports that Bob Edwards will deliver the voice of NPR’s telephone system after leaving Morning Edition.

More about Bob Edwards in the Chicago Tribune (reg. req.), in USA Today, on NPR’s On the Media and from the network’s ombudsman.

The weblog Brand Autopsy is devoted to public radio this week, with discussion of fund drive no-nos, Bob Edwards and other topics.

Gregory Nava turns the new season of American Family into a 13-part movie, sending the eldest Gonzalez son into the Iraq War, says Seattle P-I critic Melanie McFarland. She predicts a heart-wrenching season.

CPB’s latest figures for public TV and radio’s total revenues, for fiscal year 2002, show the total continuing to rise to $2.28 billion. But public TV’s number of members continued to fall, 1 million in nine years, 260,000 in a year.

Public TV won eight Peabody Awards and public radio three, the University of Georgia announced today. Bill Moyers and Jay Allison’s Transom.org received awards. WGBH won three and P.O.V., two.

Steve Bass, head of Nashville PTV, tells the Tennessean how the station could help emergency workers by datacasting information to them over the station’s DTV signal.

When WQED flickered to life on April 1, 1954, it was the nation’s first community-owned educational television station. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recalls the station’s glory days, financial free-fall and slow recovery in a 50th anniversary feature.

Some letter-writers to Salon stick up for Bob Edwards, but one, supposedly an anonymous NPR reporter, says “those of us inside the newsroom are dumb­founded by Bob Edwards’ enduring popularity.”

Former Minnesota Public Radio host Katherine Lanpher is “the only person who appears to know what she’s doing” on Al Franken’s new left-wing talk show, says the Chicago Tribune (reg. req.).

“It was Alistair Cooke’s idiosyncratic mix of the momentous and the everyday that captivated his British audience and turned his Letter from America into an institution,” wrote Karen McVeigh in The Scotsman after the BBC journalist died today. Cooke was 95 and had ceased his weekly BBC Letter from America in February.

Recent audience and membership declines at New Hampshire Public Television put the public TV network at a disadvantage against Boston powerhouse WGBH, reports the New Hampshire Sunday News.