Blogger Michael Petrelis learned that NPR news staffers Corey Flintoff and Michelle Trudeau donated to the campaigns of John Kerry and Howard Dean, violating NPR’s ethics codes. In a response to Petrelis, NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin addressed the issue in his latest online column, and the Chicago Reader takes it up as well. Meanwhile, NPR reporter Eric Weiner writes in the Christian Science Monitor that Palestinians should practice nonviolence. Other NPR reporters have previously sounded off on current events, raising questions about proper ethical conduct.

Garrison Keillor will launch Literary Friendships next year, a five-show series featuring writers who are friends talking about their work and relationships. Guests will include Sandra Cisneros, Michael Chabon and Robert Bly.

Bob Edwards tells the Boston Globe that he threatened to sue NPR over the network’s suggestions that he was booted from Morning Edition because he declined to have a co-host. In fact, Edwards says, he was never offered the option. Newly installed at XM Radio, Edwards will visit Boston’s WBUR tonight in celebration of Morning Edition‘s 25th anniversary.

“She’s not a lifestyle liberal,” says PBS host Tucker Carlson of Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman, who appeared on his show Friday. “She’s actually interested in reordering society. . . . I thought she was a good guest.” Goodman, for her part, says she’s “concerned about a right-wing takeover at PBS.” Meanwhile, Barbara Streisand, or an electronic facsimile thereof, has plugged Democracy Now on her website.

The BBC said it replaced the late Alistair Cooke’s Friday night Letter from America (at least temporarily) with A View from reports by correspondents in America, Australia, China, Brazil, South Africa, India and the Caribbean. The U.S. voice is Tim Egan, a New York Times reporter in Seattle. David Stewart describes Cooke’s longtime weekly Letter.

“The Dead Hensons are a seven piece rock band exclusively covering the upbeat songs from early Jim Henson projects (mainly Sesame Street, the Muppet Show, and the Muppet Movie).” Via cheesedip.

Pop Vultures host Kate Sullivan announced on Transom.org and her weblog that her show’s funders have decided to pull the plug. “The death of PV was due to a confluence of forces,” she said. “It wasn’t the weirdness of the show per se that killed it.”

The New York Times reviews Afghanistan Unveiled, a film created by young Afghan women who were trained as video journalists after the fall of the Taliban. The documentary debuts tonight on PBS’s Independent Lens.

WESU-FM, the student-run station at Wesleyan University, will simulcast some programming from WSHU-FM in Fairfield, Conn. Students had resisted the plan, but WESU’s g.m. says that “our initial fears have been addressed to our satisfaction.”

When Bill Moyers signs off after the Dec. 17 [2004] broadcast of Now with Bill Moyers, he will leave behind one of the longest and most productive careers in the history of public television.He came to PBS in 1971, the first of the crossover journalists — Tim Russert and George Stephanopolous are among his heirs — who parlay experience in government and politics into high-profile journalism. He’s produced and appeared in more than 400 hours of programming — the equivalent of almost 20 years of Frontline, American Experience or Nova. And the equivalent in variety as well: covering not only news and public affairs, but also addiction, death, religion, sports, music, China and the Hudson River.

The University of North Dakota sold noncommercial KUND-AM to a Catholic broadcaster, reports the Grand Forks Herald.

Doug Bennet, president of Wesleyan University and a former president of NPR, has suggested that his school’s freeform radio station simulcast a Fairfield NPR station during the day, reports the Hartford Courant. Students are protesting the idea and have presented their own proposal (Word document). (Read the university’s press release.)

NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin looks at the network’s decision to remove All Things Considered host Michele Norris from recent political stories because her husband was an adviser to John Kerry’s campaign. “. . . I worry that news organizations will in effect censor their own journalists because of what their partners and spouses do. It is dangerous because it infers that journalists are incapable of good journalism because of what their spouses and partners believe,” he writes. (Via Romenesko.)

Broadcast news hosts using sentence fragments. A Chicago Tribune article takes note of this increasingly popular trend, which has at times swept up a few NPR anchors as well.

Microsoft expects Slate, its online magazine, will be sold by the end of the year, reports the Online Journalism Review. Media reports have named the Washington Post Co. as the likely buyer. NPR and Slate co-produce the network’s Day to Day. (Via Romenesko.)