Five years after setting it up as a way of helping public TV make decisions with new decisiveness and agility, members voted decisively and nearly unanimously this month to shut it down. The National Forum for Public Television Executives, which never had a full-time staff and is folding with 87 public TV licensees — about half of the total number — as members, had held useful discussions but never proved itself indispensable, leaders said. Fifty of the 55 member stations voting in a recent ballot favored closing the forum, said Chairman Gary Ferrell last week. The forum’s governing council decided to call for the vote in June.

CPB has revived debate within public TV about balance and fairness in public affairs programs, citing specifically Bill Moyers’ dual roles of host and uninhibited commentator on his Friday-night PBS show. After a vigorous debate among station reps and producers June 9 [2003] at the PBS Annual Meeting in Miami Beach, CPB President Bob Coonrod proposed to broaden discussions within public TV on standards of fairness. In a widely circulated letter exchange with PBS President Pat Mitchell, he put topics from the session–including Moyers’ roles–on the agenda for future talks between the two. “Specific notions of fairness, or perceptions of fairness, may vary by individual or by region, but the overall message was clear: There is a deep and abiding interest among our colleagues to try to ‘get it right,'” Coonrod wrote.

The Association of Independents in Radio has published an online version of its newsletter, Airspace–and this one is devoted exclusively to independent producing and the Web.

The executive director of Pacifica says the network’s move back to Berkeley is “symbolic of Pacifica returning to its roots, returning to its mission,” reports the Los Angeles Times.

Execs at San Francisco’s KQED are looking for ways to reduce expenses and may cut up to 40 jobs, reports the Contra Costa Times. (More in the Mercury News.)

The press fails when it allows “the principle of objectivity to make us passive recipients of news, rather than aggressive analyzers and explainers of it,” writes Brent Cunningham in the Columbia Journalism Review.

The BBC is embroiled in “unusually nasty and high-stakes clashes” over its news coverage with political leaders in two countries–British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the LA Times reports.

NPR’s political coverage should include more than just the Democratic front-runners, even third-party candidates such as Lyndon LaRouche, argues network ombud Jeffrey Dvorkin.

Media Life ranked public radio’s Marketplace among its “Best of the Best.”

JJ Sutherland, creator of NPR’s upcoming midday newsmag Day to Day, discusses the show’s development at Transom.org.

KUSC-FM in Los Angeles has outsourced its underwriting sales to media behemoth Clear Channel, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Chicago Tribune critic Steve Johnson looks at what one year of competition from Louis Rukeyser on CNBC has done for Wall Street Week with Fortune and finds that the ex-PBS host has much to crow about (via Romenesko).

This revised statement was adopted in July 2003 by Public Radio News Directors Inc., the association of journalists working in public radio. Public Radio News Directors Inc. is committed to the highest standards of journalistic ethics and excellence. We must stand apart from pressures of politics and commerce as we inform and engage our listeners. We seek truth, and report with fairness and integrity. Independence and integrity are the foundations of our service, which we maintain through these principles: TRUTH Journalism is the rigorous pursuit of truth. Its practice requires fairness, accuracy, and balance. We strive to be comprehensive. We seek diverse points of view and voices to tell the stories of our communities.

The system’s revenues passed $2 billion late in the 1990s and $2.3 billion during fiscal year 2003, the latest year for which the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has complete figures. Dollar figures below are in thousands. The portion from private, non–tax-based sources passed 50 percent of the total in fiscal year 1986 and has hovered around 60 percent since FY1999 (see “Private sources row”). Source: CPB’s annual Public Broadcasting Revenue reports. For breakdowns between public TV and public radio and other details, see CPB’s latest full report, for fiscal 2003 system revenues, in a PDF file. See also CPB appropriation history.

Criticism of NPR’s partnership with Slate “sort of infuriated” staffers at the online mag, says editor Jacob Weisberg in Online Journalism Review.