PBS’s president stands by her decision (“not an easy one”) to pull the two-mommies episode of Buster, reported Broadcasting & Cable. “I wouldn’t inject PBS stations into a culture war they did not start and cannot stop,” Pat Mitchell said at an AWRT meeting Feb. 25. Via Benton.org.

“My challenge is to develop a public radio sound that’s different from NPR but compatible,” says American Public Media’s Jim Russell in a Minneapolis Star-Tribune interview.

A Washington, D.C., radio listener bemoans recent format changes, including WETA’s: “[I]t seems like radio used to be so much better.”

Independent producer Benjamen Walker discusses his show and podcasting with Pitchforkmedia.com: “Where do I see myself as having more of a future, the Internet or NPR? I’d pick the Internet, definitely.” Also at Pitchfork, a profile of KCMP, Minnesota Public Radio’s new eclectic station.

Podcasting has doubled the online audience for WNYC’s On the Media in just four weeks. And Tod Maffin has started PublicRadioFeeds.com, a directory to podcasting pubcasters that is similar to ours.

“I think there’s a lot of fear in the air out there,” KCPT President Bill Reed tells the Kansas City Star, in an article about “A Company of Soldiers,” a Frontline documentary that includes profanity spoken by American soldiers under fire. “That’s how the climate is now. You have to go back to the McCarthy era to get a feel for how far this has gone.” [Via TV Barn.] KCPT is one of 40 public TV stations that will air the documentary tonight with the unedited language.

Pittsburgh’s WQED-FM aims to remain a localized classical music station, “[b]ut the community is not holding up its part of the deal,” says president George Miles Jr. in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. As Current recently reported, other stations have also been having trouble with classical.

Listen to Current Senior Editor Karen Everhart‘s Feb. 18 appearance on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (RealAudio).

“We like to have fun with the show and we like to be adventurous, but at bottom, we want to urgently illuminate what the hell is going on in this world,” says On Point host Tom Ashbrook in the BU Bridge.

Minneapolis Public Schools has rebuffed offers from Minnesota Public Radio to buy KBEM-FM, the school district’s financially troubled jazz station, reports the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

CPB President Kathleen Cox tells the Washington Post that, contrary to what PBS President Pat Mitchell and her spokeswoman have said, Cox did not confer with Mitchell on whether to withdraw “Sugartime!,” the Postcards from Buster program depicting Vermont children with two mommies. “[T]he first I heard from her was after she made that decision, explaining that she had made the decision after receiving the Spellings letter,” Cox says.

“We feel strongly that the language of war should not be sanitized and that there is nothing indecent about its use in this context.” In a memo to public TV stations, producers of Frontline ask them to take a stand for the First Amendment by airing a documentary that includes the real language of soldiers in combat [via Romenesko].

The New York Times reports that PBS’s identity crisis goes far deeper than the announcement by Pat Mitchell that she would step down next year as the beleaguered network’s president.

“I just wanted to make clear that I’ve got 15 months left on this job and let’s make this as constructive as we can,” says PBS President Pat Mitchell in a Washington Post column that links her announcement that she’ll leave PBS next year to her handling of the Buster “two mommies” program.

CPB is accepting applications for the next funding round for digital radio conversion. The deadline is April 29.