Maryland Public Television’s contracting and bonus practices came under fire in a report released yesterday by the state’s legislative auditor, reports the Baltimore Sun.

The Baltimore Sun runs down the history behind Joan Kroc’s $200 million gift to NPR.

The Baltimore Sun‘s David Folkenflik reports on a proposal to privatize Maryland Public Television.

Wall Street Week with Fortune, the PBS series that reinvented itself last year after a messy split with original host Louis Rukeyser, is setting itself further apart from its progenitor. The program sharpened its reporting this fall on the scandal-plagued financial markets while expanding its coverage to economic trends beyond Wall Street. Acknowledging the steady drumbeat of news about improper trading practices and corporate malfeasance, Executive Producer Larry Moscow wants WSW to reflect investors’ ire over scams that deflated their portfolios and retirement accounts. Investors, he observed, are now saying, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Interesting tidbit: Fox News’s right-wing talker Sean Hannity got his start in broadcasting at public station KCSB in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes writes in the Columbia Journalism Review that “a sense that [the U.S. press] had abdicated its duty to help the public think beyond instinctive reactions” drove her out of journalism and into advocacy work in Afghanistan.

Techno watcher Dennis Haarsager, a PBS activist and Washington State University official, has launched a weblog with his annotated links to media technology news.

Media critic Michael Wolff says PBS’s NewsHour caved to outside pressure when it spiked his interview with correspondent Terence Smith, reports today’s New York Daily News and Washington Post. “PBS, which is supposed to be the alternative to big media, is censoring my views because it fears they might offend the folks who run big media,” he writes in a letter to Smith [via Romenesko].

The White House has nominated Republican activist Gay Hart Gaines of Palm Beach, Fla., to join the CPB Board. Gaines was chairman of Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC and of the National Review Institute, founded by William F. Buckley Jr.

Kansas City Star critic Aaron Barnhart objects to Bill Moyers serving as both host and “axe-grinding opinionator” on his PBS show. Tonight’s episode becomes “an infuriatingly one-sided diatribe,” Barnhart says.

WAMU ran a $2.3 million deficit in fiscal 2003, depleting all of its cash reserves and putting the station nearly $500,000 in debt to license-holder American University, reports the Washington Post. The station released its 2003 audited financial statements this week (PDF).

Eleven SUNY Plattsburgh students have agreed to participate in a public TV program about hazing and alcohol abuse — and help pay for it — in a plea bargain after the fraternity pledging death of a freshman, The Saratogian reports. The media lab at Mountain Lake PBS is producing.

A journalist new to radio, John Solomon of WNYC’s On the Media, exposes some of the artifice of radio postproduction, which makes pubradio people sound lots more articulate than they are. To make the point, co-host Bob Garfield is stripped bare and flogged. Solomon says the magic is better hidden in radio than in TV or print. [Audio file.]

Weak listener support at Pacifica’s WBAI-FM in New York and KPFK in Los Angeles is prompting the network to cut back at the stations, with possible layoffs at WBAI, reports the Village Voice.

Big interview with NPR’s Anne Garrels in The Morning News. We’ll add a pithy quote after we’ve had a chance to read it (now welcoming suggestions).