The executive committee of NETA, one of the largest associations of pubTV stations, told the CPB Board in a letter May 31 that it had gone about its balancing efforts in the wrong way — at the national level. The letter explained: “…The solutions will not be found in press statements or surreptitious studies. Instead, bring them to the licensees. We have a direct relationship with our audience and we have the authority and responsibility to act.” The Organization of State Broadcasting Executives, representing 32 “primarily rural” pubcasting systems, urged CPB Chair Ken Tomlinson June 16 to speak out today for full restoration of federal aid to pubcasting, without which stations will close in some rural communities.

This essay appeared in the Washington Post June 21, 2005, after Bill Moyers retired from hosting the PBS weekly public affairs program. I must be the luckiest man in television for having been a part of the public broadcasting community for over half my life. I was present at the creation. As a 30-year-old White House policy assistant in 1964, I attended the first meeting at the Office of Education to discuss the potential of “educational television,” which in turn led to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. When I left the White House that year to become publisher of Newsday, I did fundraising chores for Channel Thirteen in New York and appeared on its local newscasts.

The old “Save Sesame Street” e-mail hoax has made it harder for some people to take cyber-petitions about public broadcasting’s funding crisis seriously, the New York Times reports.

Documentary filmmakers Tracy Strain and Randall MacLowry were to marry yesterday, according to the New York Times. They recently collaborated on “Building the Alaska Highway,” an American Experience film.

While the CPB Board meets in D.C. this week, critics are planning events criticizing plans to hire a Republican leader as CPB president. On Monday, leaders of Common Cause and Free Press and media watchdog Jeff Chester plan to give CPB 150,000 petitions opposing partisan meddling with CPB. On Tuesday, children’s TV advocate Peggy Charren will join Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in an event on Capitol Hill, Broadcasting & Cable reported (sub required).

Groups of senators and representatives wrote to CPB on Friday urging that it delay the appointment of a new president. Twenty-one reps asked CPB to begin a “transparent and nonpartisan search” to fill the job. Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan, Hillary Clinton and Frank Lautenberg questioning board Chairman Ken Tomlinson’s plan to hire the former chief of the Republican party (PDF): “We find it astonishing that [Patricia] Harrison, given her former prominence as a partisan political figure, would be even considered as a candidate for a job that demands that the occupant be nonpolitical.” APTS earlier told CPB it would oppose acts that violate, or appear to violate, pubcasters’ independence.

Through the progressive advocacy website MoveOn.org, more than 769,000 Web users have sent messages to Congress backing pubcasting: “Congress must save NPR, PBS and local public stations. We trust them for in-depth news and educational children’s programming. It’s money well spent.”

The proposed cuts to CPB funding, if enacted, could trigger “a spiral of death for public broadcasting,” said KCPT President Bill Reed on today’s Democracy Now.

A coalition of citizen groups including Common Cause and Free Press has urged CPB Chairman Ken Tomlinson to postpone the board’s vote on a new CPB president, now planned for Monday or Tuesday. The groups’ letter yesterday suggests that Tomlinson’s supposed candidate for the job, State Department official Patricia Harrison, got “inappropriately favorable consideration” because she and Tomlinson have worked together on U.S. propaganda efforts overseas.

The House Appropriations Committee approved a bill last night that cuts pubcasting’s total 2006 funding by more than 40 percent. It would reduce CPB funding from $400 million to $300 million, eliminate the $23 million Ready to Learn program and deny requests for $39 million in digital transition funding and $50 million to replace the aging pubTV satellite system. But the committee approved a Democratic amendment that restores the traditional congressional practice of funding CPB two years in advance, earmarking $400 million for 2008. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) told Reuters he will try to add funding for pubcasting when the bill comes to the House floor.

“The Bush administration is introducing a political agenda to public broadcasting,” writes columnist Molly Ivins. “They are using the lame pretext that PBS is somehow liberal to justify [turning] it into a propaganda organ for the government.”

Stepping in where the Ready to Learn program may be cutting back, CPB has allotted up to $3 million for grants to stations that work with childhood literacy, the corporation announced at pubTV’s National Center for Outreach Conference. Eighty to 100 stations will get “Ready to Lead in Literacy” grants of up to $35,000, said Ken Ferree, acting president. [Text of his remarks.]

Columnist Tom Teepen makes the case for supporting public broadcasting: “Public TV and radio are the anti-crudity media, refuges from the wasteland, a demonstration that mass media don’t have to probe constantly for the lowest common denominator, and a standing rebuke to the commercial media for defaulting on their putative public trust.”

Rhode Island’s attorney general will continue investigating Boston University’s management of its Rhode Island stations, reports the Boston Globe, despite the university’s decision not to sell the stations. ”The motivation behind the decision to sell WRNI was shrouded in secrecy, and the motivation behind the decision not to sell doesn’t seem that much clearer,” said Patrick Lynch.

Investigators from CPB’s Inspector General’s Office are examining payments that the corporation made to two Republican lobbyists who provided “strategic advice” on legislation that would have changed the composition of the CPB Board, according to the New York Times.