Helen Mirren talks with the New York Times about getting naked on screen.

NPR acknowledges in the Washington Post that it’s polling listeners about whether Bob Edwards’ departure from Morning Edition will affect their tuning in.

A telemarketing call goes awry for WVIZ.

A leading advocate for independent producers and openness in the governance of public broadcasting, Laurence S. Hall died Feb. 21 [2004] after a recurrence of cancer, according to one of his sons, Ole Hall. He was 74. Hall was one of “the three Larrys” — the others being Lawrence Daressa and Lawrence Sapadin — who were among the leaders of the 1980s movement to secure a role for independent producers in public TV. If there was one person responsible for that “modest miracle of legislation,” Daressa said recently, it was Hall. “He’s the person who should have won a Ralph Lowell Award,” said Jeff Chester, an activist who worked for the legislation.

Ira Glass toiled at humdrum radio stories for eight years before he showed any sign of developing a unique voice, he tells the Los Angeles Daily News.

An aggressive ad campaign touts WEIU, a tiny public TV station in eastern Illinois, as “your new choice for PBS.” The slogan annoys its northern public TV neighbor WILL to no end, according to the Campaign News-Gazette.

The PBS broadcast of Shroud of Christ?, presented April 7 on Secrets of the Dead, has drawn complaints from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. The presentation was “a study in pseudoscience, faulty logic, and the suppression of historical facts,” writes a CSICOP senior researcher. “The intellectual incompetence or outright dishonesty of the show’s producers is matched only by that of the PBS executives who foisted it on a credulous Easter-season audience.”

The Washington Post tries adding some perspective to the reassignment of Bob Edwards, but makes little progress in untangling the PR web behind it. (Reg. req.) “We have all heard of people rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” writes a Louisville Courier-Journal columnist. “[NPR’s Jay] Kernis is throwing deck chairs overboard from the company flagship.” (More in the San Francisco Chronicle.)

The cry from a distraught public rang out: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” After announcing the reassignment of Morning Edition host Bob Edwards March 23, the network struggled to explain itself amid a coast-to-coast NPR-bashing in the media and a record influx of listener complaints. Some public radio managers joined the attack on NPR brass. Even those who supported the network’s aim — to strengthen Morning Edition with a two-host setup — criticized it for poor timing and lack of public-relations finesse. Many stations were scheduled to begin on-air fund drives shortly after the announcement and feared repercussions. The network will reassign Edwards as a senior correspondent at the end of April, removing him from the high-profile post he held for almost 25 years.

NPR reassigned Morning Edition host Bob Edwards to make way for a two-host setup intended to strengthen the show's news coverage, said Jay Kernis, NPR's senior v.p. of programming.

Was Emma Goldman a fraud, a killer or a real revolutionary? PBS viewers won’t find the answer in tonight’s American Experience, writes a New York Times reviewer. By ignoring the question, the film “forgoes an opportunity to illuminate the link between idealism and terrorism and to gauge the relevance of Goldman to our accursed world.”

Just five weeks after filing his last Letter from America for the BBC, Alistair Cooke died March 30 [2004] at his home in Manhattan. He was 95 and had heart disease. Cooke had delivered the Letter for 58 years, far exceeding his 26 years as a U.S. correspondent for Britain's Guardian newspaper or the mere 22 years he hosted Masterpiece Theatre.

Louis Schwartz, an attorney active in public broadcasting for three decades and a partner in Schwartz, Woods & Miller, died March 31. His family is holding a memorial service Saturday, April 10, at the River Road Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Md.

WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., has received the largest donation in its history, a $250,000 bequest from late journalist and communications professional Ellen Wadley Roper.

An editorial cartoonist imagines mornings without Bob.