The Federal Communications on Wednesday (Dec. 28) issued an order reaffirming the “tribal priority” it created in 2009 to bolster Native American rights in broadcast licenses. In a concurring statement, retiring Commissioner Michael Copps called the order a “wonderful step” toward “bringing modern telecommunications to Indian Country.” John Crigler, a longtime telecom attorney working with Native Public Media (NPM), told Current that the order recognizes “the inherent right of tribes to serve their own people, by recognizing that tribes and Alaska Native villages are political, not racial classifications.” Crigler said the FCC adopted a requirement that protects tribes from proposing a broadcast allocation, only to lose it to a non-tribal bidder at auction.

Kentucky Educational Television in Lexington begins programming partnerships with pubradio stations in the state in January, it said in a statement Wednesday (Dec. 28). Participating will be WEKU in Richmond and WKMS in Murray, with other pubcasters coming on soon. “Our partnership with Kentucky public radio stations will strengthen the public broadcasting service for Kentuckians by expanding access to trusted signature public affairs programming,” said Shae Hopkins, KET executive director. KET series and programs available to public radio stations for broadcast will include Kentucky Tonight, Comment on Kentucky, One to One with Bill Goodman, Connections with Renee Shaw, Education Matters, Jubilee, Legislative Update, candidate forums and election night coverage.

KNPB, PBS in Reno, Nev., will end children’s programming at 12:30 p.m. starting next week, cutting 2.5 hours from its nine-hour daily schedule of kids’ shows, reports Technorati, noting that the change “will put KNPB tied in third place for the fewest hours of daily children’s programs among 30 PBS affiliated stations surveyed in the western United States,” after California stations KRCB in Rohnert Park and KCSM in San Mateo, which is currently for sale. The new schedule goes into effect Jan. 2, 2012. In an email to Technorati, Kurt Mische, KNPB president, said that the changes “will allow us to serve a larger audience of viewers .

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, on the stump ahead of Iowa’s Jan. 3 GOP caucuses, today (Dec. 28) told a crowd at a deli in Clinton, Iowa, that if elected, he would end public broadcasting funding, reports ABC News. “We subsidize PBS,” he said. “Look, I’m going to stop that. I’m going to say, ‘PBS is going to have to have advertisements.’ We’re not going to kill Big Bird, but Big Bird’s going to have to have advertisements, all right? And we’re going to have endowments for the arts and humanities but they’re going to be paid for by private charity, not by taxpayers — or by borrowers.”

Robert A. Woods, 80, a retired founding partner in the communications law firm of Schwartz, Woods & Miller, died Dec. 22 following a long illness. A funeral service will be held Thursday morning in Bethesda, Md. The firm handled FCC and other matters for numerous public broadcasting stations as well as for common carriers and commercial broadcasters. Woods had served as outside general counsel for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and the Joint Council on Educational Broadcasting, which advocated the commission’s reservation of channels for educational TV in the 1950s. Woods and Louis Schwartz started the firm in 1970. Lawrence M.

An 11-page diatribe from a former Antiques Roadshow appraiser to producing station WGBH provides a look deep inside public television’s most popular national show as Roadshow knockoffs proliferate on cable channels. The issues raised by Gary Sohmers, a Hawaiian shirt-clad, Converse sneaker-wearing pop-culture expert, reveal in particular how intensely the program works to protect its brand. In the case of another appraiser, the Boston station stood its ground with a $900,000 copyright-infringement lawsuit. In response to Sohmers, WGBH is conducting an internal review of his complaints about the Appraisal Event Participation Agreement that all experts sign, though they are not financially compensated for work and must pay their own travel and hotel expenses for multiday shoots nationwide.

When KCET announced in October 2010 that it would quit PBS after four decades as its primary Los Angeles affiliate, the task facing PBS was enormous: Find a local outlet to step into the breach, establish new branding, arrange for cable carriage, find homes for orphaned shows, and, most importantly, change long-term tuning habits so 16 million-plus potential viewers could find their favorite programs. All in less than three months. The outlet that stepped up was Orange County’s KOCE, a second-string station still recovering from a costly, drawn-out legal battle with religious programmer Daystar Television Network several years earlier. KOCE became PBS SoCal and, with extensive effort and CPB aid, the PBS program schedule began broadcasts on a new channel Jan.

Progressive radio talk-show host Lynn Samuels, 69, who began her career on public radio, was found deceased in her apartment on Christmas Eve, the New York Daily News reports. When Samuels didn’t show up for her Sirius XM show on Saturday (Dec. 24), reps for the satellite radio company asked the police to investigate. Officers found her body in the apartment in Queens. Samuels began her radio career in 1979 at Pacifica Radio’s WBAI in New York City. In the 1980s she moved to WABC, where she was fired a total of three times — once for calling for the assassination of President George H.W.

And now for an annual seasonal treat, a few ho-ho-ho-horrible holiday tunes courtesy of the ever-amusing Annoying Music Show from Chicago Public Radio.

Edwin G. Burrows, a public radio pioneer who was instrumental in getting federal aid to public radio — when CPB’s founding legislation initially planned only the Corporation for Public Television — died Nov. 20 in Edmonds, Wash. He was 94. His public radio career began in 1948 as program director at WUOM, Ann Arbor, Mich., according to the National Public Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland Libraries, where Burrows’s papers reside. He helped create WVGR in Grand Rapids in 1961, and in 1966 he was made manager of WUOM and WVGR. While at WUOM, Burrows helped charter National Educational Radio, the radio division of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB).

A man attempting to parachute off the Maryland Public Television tower in Crownsville, Md., was injured after his chute didn’t properly open, reports local ABC station WJLA. Robert Scott Morgan, 25, of Fairfax, Va., was hospitalized. Morgan and Sean Michael Bullington, 34, of Draper, Utah, were charged with trespassing. This was the second BASE (buildings, antennas, spans and earth) jump incident recently in the area. Five persons were charged with trespassing at WETA’s radio tower in Arlington, Va., Dec. 14.

Judy Jankowski, who held top management positions at several public broadcasting stations, died Dec. 17 at Kindred Hospital in Westminster, Calif. She was 61. She started her long pubcasting career as a traffic manager at WOUB in Athens, Ohio. She worked as general manager of WDUQ in Pittsburgh, Pa., from the mid-1980s until 1994; she retired as general manager of KKJZ in Long Beach, Calif., in 2005. She also held executive positions at stations in Birmingham, Ala., and Houston. “I first knew Judy when we both worked in Texas in the early 1980’s, and from then on she was a friend, colleague and collaborator,” said Scott Hanley, another former g.m.

After using a line-item veto this spring to trim state funding for Virginia’s public broadcasting stations, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell has proposed to completely eliminate the subsidies. McDonnell’s first biennial budget, unveiled on Dec. 19, would cut $3.6 million in annual appropriations for Virginia’s public television and radio stations and their educational telecommunications services. The total reduction over two years, 2013-14, would be $7.2 million. David Mullins, president of WVPT in Harrisonburg, plans to appeal to state lawmakers to reject McDonnell’s proposal. “[W]e will make our case with the General Assembly for funding the unique and valued services WVPT and our public broadcasting partners throughout Virginia provide,” he said in a statement provided to the Washington Post.

The Milwaukee Area Technical College Board of Directors voted Tuesday (Dec. 20) 7-0 to place the fundraising operations of the MPTV Friends group under the management of Milwaukee Public Television. The Journal Sentinel reports that the Friends group has raised $100 million over several decades to support public TV stations WMVS-TV (Channel 10) and WMVT-TV (Channel 36). Ellis Bromberg, general manager of Milwaukee Public Television, refers to the agreement as a “merger”; a former Friends board member and president, John Bernaden, calls it a “hostile takeover.” The agreement now proceeds to the Friends board.

PBS NewsHour gave viewers more than one-third more coverage of international events over the last year than other TV outlets, including cable, morning and network evening news, according to “The Year in the News,” the annual analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report says that 39 percent of time on the NewsHour was spent on foreign events and U.S. foreign policy, compared with 28 percent on television in general, 23 percent on cable news programs, 24 percent on network morning news shows and 24 percent on network evening broadcasts. NewsHour also spent a third more time covering government than its direct competitors, commercial network evening newscasts (12 percent vs.