The FCC will act soon on authorizing multicasting for digital radio, said Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Dallas. But talks about public interest obligations on the new channels are causing a holdup, Radio World reports.

Greg Diefenbach, a longtime executive producer at a major supplier of PBS programs, Devillier Donegan Enterprises, is CPB’s new senior v.p. for TV programming. At DDE he oversaw the PBS world history series Empires (“great eras of struggle … explosive creativity, ultimate depravity…”) among 100 hours of programming. He succeeds Michael Pack, who returned to documentary production. Pack colleague John Prizer remains at CPB as an advisor to President Pat Harrison.

NPR’s Kevin Klose will cede his role as c.e.o. of the network Oct. 1 to Ken Stern, now executive v.p. Klose will continue serving as president and will lead a collaborative fundraising initiative to support public radio. Stern, who joined NPR in 1999, will assume all management duties.

Warren Bell is undoubtedly a vocal conservative, but does he support federal funding of public broadcasting? Conflicting accounts of the CPB Board nominee’s views on pubcasting influenced the Senate Commerce Committee to drop Bell from today’s nomination hearing, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Television comedy writer Warren Bell will not appear at tomorrow’s Senate confirmation hearing for CPB Board nominees, according to an news release posted by the Commerce Committee.

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam asks what Joan Kroc’s gift has done for public radio. “Two hundred twenty-five million dollars later, public radio certainly hasn’t gotten worse,” he writes. “But I don’t hear that it has gotten any better.”

Filmmaker Ric Burns explains to the New York Times why “Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film,” debuting tonight on PBS’s American Masters, is a “nerd film.” Reviews in the Hollywood Reporter and San Francisco Chronicle note the artist who famously set the standard of 15 minutes of fame for everyone has himself been given four hours. Newsday‘s reviewer is disappointed that Burns “skims past” the less inspiring chapters of Warhol’s life, “such as the endless evenings he spent cozying up to celebrities at Studio 54.”

The APTS Board will decide later this week whether to oppose Senate confirmation of CPB Board nominee Warren Bell. “We have not hesitated to express our strong reservations to the members of the Senate Commerce Committee about him,” APTS President John Lawson tells Broadcasting & Cable. “We had hoped that he would come forward and reach out and help allay some of the fears that we have, but we haven’t seen any attempts like that.”

The CPB Board yesterday voted to reelect Cheryl Halpern as chair, but was unable to break a deadlock over nominees for vice-chair, according to Broadcasting & Cable. Gay Hart Gaines, a Republican fundraiser from Florida who was nominated for a second term as vice chair, will extend her service as vice-chairman until the board elects a successor by majority vote. The Senate Commerce Committee may help speed the board’s decision making. It will hold a hearing on Sept. 21 on all three pending CPB Board nominations.

The Washington Post profiles Sarah Chayes, a former NPR reporter who left the network in 2002 to work for a nongovernmental organization in Afghanistan. Her new book, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, is “the kind of fleshed-out portrait that even the best on-the-run journalism rarely provides,” writes Bob Thompson.

Jake Shapiro concludes a wrap-up of last week’s Public Radio Program Directors conference with an observation that the annual meeting feels “a bit stuck.” “Given NPR’s New Realities meetings and the ‘unconference’ experiments underway elsewhere, it would be helpful to break out of panel mode for some open facilitated meetings — tap into the wisdom of the crowd,” he writes. Mary McGrath of public radio’s Open Source also reflects on the conference: “Public broadcasters have been slow to wake up to the opportunities afforded by the Web. Some of the old timers just want to be retired before they have to really deal with it.

Aiming to extend its relationships with parents of Nick Jr. kids, Nickelodeon is beta-testing a social networking website for parents, the New York Times reports. The site, ParentsConnect.com, allows registered members to blog and plans to add user-generated video.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram weighs in on the latest controversy involving Kenneth Tomlinson, the former CPB chairman who’s in hot water over his leadership of the federal Broadcasting Board of Governors.

The Senate called for a study into the effects of “screen media” on kids’ cognitive development, Adweek reports.

The New York Times looks at commercial radio’s efforts to counteract the industry’s flagging fortunes as listeners increasingly opt for iPods, satellite and other music options. “Over the last three years, the stocks of the five largest publicly traded radio companies are down between 30 percent and 60 percent as investors wonder when the industry will bottom out,” the paper reports.