PBS is demanding that KCTS-TV pay $3.2 million in back dues, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. President Bill Mohler is appealing to viewers for help.

Listen to or read Sandra Tsing Loh’s Marketplace commentary about getting fired from KCRW-FM in Santa Monica, Calif.

After some fiddling with language, station leaders Feb. 23 [2004] endorsed a new mission statement describing public TV as a “unifying force in American culture.” Several participants celebrated the agreement at the PBS Annual Members Meeting as a significant demonstration of unity among the network’s notoriously divided members. “The beauty of this is that all the stations could sign on to something,” commented Ellis Bromberg, g.m. of WMVS/WMVT in Milwaukee. During the debate, station leaders agreed that the proposed “Vision” paragraph at the end of the mission statement had grown too wordy and needed to be simplified. PBS Board Chairman Alberto Ibarguen advised executives to vote on the concepts articulated in the statement rather than editing through a parliamentary process.

L.A. Observed reports that Sandra Tsing Loh will comment on her firing from KCRW-FM in Los Angeles on today’s Marketplace. In the Los Angeles Times, Loh said public radio is becoming “a seeping beigeness, a grim, endless, drumbeat of ‘responsibility’ that all the groovy Argentine trance-hop music in the world can’t make up for.”

The Guardian features a lengthy profile of Garrison Keillor. “He must live like a 19th-century vicar having to write his sermon every week,” says Jane Smiley of Keillor. “In some ways that’s why it is so reassuring.”

Minnesota Public Radio has purchased a house which it will renovate and open to the public for tours, reports The Business Journals. Proceeds from the tours and the eventual sale of the house will fund a $46 million capital campaign for expansion of MPR’s offices.

WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., brought back longtime volunteers for its latest fund drive, part of its efforts to move past its recent troubles, reports the Washington Post. [Earlier coverage in Current.]

With a show of hands, all but a few public TV station chiefs attending an APTS Capitol Hill Day meeting Feb. 24 [2004] said the lobbying group should keep developing its “digital-only broadcasting,” or DOB, strategy. [APTS went public with the plan in a press release March 18.] Instead of continuing to use analog TV channels for the next decade or more, the strategy goes, public TV would make a concerted effort to speed viewers’ move to digital over-the-air broadcasting, cable or satellite reception. The government, pleased to earn billions from early auctions of the channels, would give public TV special assistance in exchange.

NPR’s Tavis Smiley tells the New York Daily News he would never have disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair on his show because he’s “an embarrassment to any African-American journalist in this country.”

Dee Davis, longtime Appalshop chief and producer of docs on public TV, helped fend off CBS’s “reality” remake of Beverly Hillbillies and now intends to fight a UPN series that, critics say, will exploit Amish teenagers, the New York Times reports.

Chicago’s WBEZ-FM expands its reach to the southwest tomorrow with the signing-on of WBEQ-FM, a transmitter licensed to Morris, Ill.

Santa Monica’s KCRW fired commentator Sandra Tsing Loh for using a four-letter word in her feature Feb. 29, the Los Angeles Times reported. (Registration required.) The word aired twice even though it was pretaped. Congress meanwhile is still aroused politically by the Super Bowl incident. A House subcommittee approved increasing the fine for broadcast indecency to $500,000, according to wire service reports. [More at L.A. Observed and LA CityBEAT.]

Bet you didn’t expect that the brains behind the new Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is Peter Sagal, host of NPR’s Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! The Washington Post has the scoop.

Seattle’s KEXP-FM will program KBTC-FM in nearby Tacoma, Wash., the stations announced today. Public Radio Capital purchased the station from Bates Technical College for $5 million. (Coverage in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Denver Business Journal.)

Alistair Cooke, 95, has filed his last Letter from America and was absent from the BBC broadcast last week because of illness, the Observer reported. He had reported from the States to BBC listeners for 58 years. Via Pubradio.