LA Magazine profiles NPR host Tavis Smiley and writes up the network’s West Coast expansion: “The network has looked at Los Angeles the way characters do in Woody Allen movies—we’re the wacky outpost where trends come from and where Hollywood rules all,” writes RJ Smith. “We make the folks in D.C. feel that much better about themselves.”

Longtime critic of liberal bias at PBS, David Horowitz, has sued conservative producer Lionel Chetwynd (National Desk and the recent Darkness at High Noon) for kicking him off the board of Chetwynd’s production company, Whidbey Island Films, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Horowitz says PBS pressured Chetwynd to oust him.

A sober Muppet story: The New York Times reports that the Palestinian-Israeli-Jordanian version of Sesame Street has had to give up the idea that Muppets of all nationalities can meet as friends on a single street.

Hostile TV critics grilled PBS on its treatment of Louis Rukeyser, its handling of the HIV-positive Muppet flap, and antiquated scheduling strategies during a July 26 executive session in Pasadena.

WFDD-FM in Winston-Salem, N.C., has dropped its broadcast of Sunday sermons and Baptist church services, according to the Winston-Salem Journal. “The loss is a great one,” wrote a Journal columnist. The broadcasts threatened WFDD’s receipt of an NTIA grant in 1995.

A janitor at New York’s WNYC-FM/AM stole a list of donors and sold it to an identity-theft ring, according to The New York Times.

Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, a D.C.-based advocate for minority ownership and employment in media, announced that it has launched a website, www.mmtconline.org. Former FCC member Henry Rivera is chairman and David Honig is executive director.

NABET-CWA has posted a fact sheet about its new contract with NPR. (See July 23 entry, below.)

Though nominally about religious broadcasting, the Christian Community Broadcasters‘ website features regular updates about the FCC’s dispensation of low-power FM licenses.

British broadcasters are pushing digital radio enthusiastically, though there are few affordable sets in the stores, WNYC’s On the Media reported.

Rounded corners and a new font define the slightly updated look at NPR.org.

Leo McKern, whose Rumpole of the Bailey performances were produced in Britain between 1975 and 1992 and aired successfully on PBS, died at the age of 82, according to a New York Times obit.

More from Louis Rukeyser: I lost interest in Maryland Public TV when they ambushed me, he tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

It’s not dead yet: MetaFilter thread about NPR’s “new” linking policy.

NPR technicians will vote Aug. 12 on a new union contract, the product of six months of negotiations. The National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, which represents about 80 NPR techies, won some concessions from NPR on raises and jurisdictional issues, but not enough to endorse the contract, according to NABET-CWA staff rep Paula Olson. Technicians overwhelmingly defeated an earlier contract in January.