“Most environmental documentaries try to persuade or preach or, these days, scare; E2 feels as if it’s trying to cheerlead and to sell,” writes the New York Times‘ Mike Hale of the series’ second season, which premieres this month. “That makes it an odd fit on today’s PBS, where news and public affairs programs like Frontline, Now and Bill Moyers Journal, with their reporting and advocacy on Iraq, civil liberties and other fraught topics, are simultaneously among the best and the gloomiest shows on television.”

The Wall Street Journal asks NPR CEO Ken Stern whether the network’s new morning show and online music service will undercut Morning Edition and the streaming services of member stations.

Pittsburgh jazz/news station WDUQ finds itself in the middle of an abortion-politics hardball contest between its licensee, Catholic-run Duquesne University, and Planned Parenthood. Soon after WDUQ began running Planned Parenthood underwriting spots Oct. 8 [2007], the university ordered the station to stop accepting money from a group “not aligned with our Catholic identity,” even though the underwriting went solely to the station. Though abortion is one of the reproductive health services offered by the local Planned Parenthood affiliate, the word wasn’t used in the spots. The text for one spot said: “Support for WDUQ comes from Planned Parenthood—reducing unintended pregnancy by improving access to contraception.”

Fox News Channel will air the CPB-funded doc Islam vs. Islamists on Saturday (9 p.m. Eastern time), with wraparound material in PBS style, Fox announced today. In the wraparound, Fox will interview the program’s producers about their conflicts with PBS, which refused to distribute the film without further revision. Think-tank pundit and co-producer Frank Gaffney says PBS wanted “to bring more of an Islamist flavor” to his film. Exec producers of CPB’s Crossroads series at WETA said the film’s warnings about Islamist influence were alarmist and unsupported, and omitted it from the initial series aired by PBS in April. The DVD is selling for just under $25, including shipping.

Judy Critchton, the founding executive producer of American Experience, died Oct. 14 at age 77, the New York Times reported. She succumbed to complications of leukemia. Crichton talked about the state of the documentary arts in 1997, after retiring from the program.

After Stephen Colbert announced last week on CNN’s Larry King that he might be running for president (on Republican and Democratic tickets), South Carolina ETV invited Colbert to formally announce his campaign on its air. South Carolina is Colbert’s home state. Colbert’s byline appeared Sunday in the New York Times, apparently the result of Maureen Dowd’s dare that he write an Op-Ed. In his column, Colbert discusses his presidential aspirations and writes “I want to return to a simpler America where we ate our meat off the end of a sharpened stick.”

Pittsburgh’s WDUQ-FM stopped running underwriting credits for Planned Parenthood (essentially, ceased accepting donations from an abortion-rights advocate) on orders from its licensee, the Catholic-run Duquesne University, the Post-Gazette reported today. In a loosely analogous case 10 years ago, a federal court ruled that a Missouri university had the right to reject Ku Klux Klan underwriting on KWMU-FM, St. Louis.

During its Oct. 12-19 filing window for new noncommercial FM stations, the Federal Communications Commission will allow single entities to file no more than ten applications, according to a public notice issued this afternoon. The ten-application limit is “consistent with the localism and diversity goals reflected in the NCE FM point system and appropriately balances our goals of deterring speculative filings, facilitating the expeditious processing of window-filed applications with limited commission resources, and providing interested parties with a meaningful opportunity to file for NCE FM new stations,” the commission said in the notice.

NPR’s new chief operating officer is Mitch Praver, a new-media exec with top-level experience at National Geographic and Discovery Communications. He’ll take charge of the network’s daily operations. Since leaving NGS in 2004, Praver managed an AOL unit that integrated AOL Instant Messenger into the online service and most recently ran business development and sales for Hillcrest Labs, developer of the Freespace interface technology used in the Logitech Air Mouse. The appointment was announced today by CEO Ken Stern.

A New York Times editorial on broadcasters’ growing tendency to self-censor points to weak-kneed decisions by public broadcasters: WBAI’s retreat from broadcasting Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” and PBS’s editing of swear-words from The War.

The Virginian-Pilot reports that Minnesota Public Radio is suing a Christian rock station in Virginia Beach over its use of the name “The Current,” which is the brand name of MPR’s Triple-A music service.

San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre concluded in an Oct. 3 report (PDF) that the city’s KPBS-FM/TV is violating PBS’s balance and objectivity standards after canceling Full Focus, a daily public affairs show. “The lack of balance and objectivity in KPBS-produced programming clearly contravenes PBS Editorial Standards and Policies,” he wrote. Aguirre also took issue with the selection of hosts for Editors Roundtable, another public affairs show, but stopped short of proposing penalties for KPBS or asking the station to rectify the situation. KPBS News Director Michael Marcotte responds: “Taking Full Focus off the air was certainly a loss for our community –- because he’s right when he says it was one of the few sources of balanced, in-depth civic discourse on San Diego television.

Frontline announced its new fall lineup on PBS, beginning Oct. 16 with “Cheney’s Law.” Other doc subjects: America’s relationship with Iran, the business of being an undertaker, the Darfur crisis, and CIA kidnapping of terror suspects (Frontline/World). [See a preview video.]

A measure of how far the cultural battle over broadcast indecency has shifted: New York’s WBAI, the Pacifica station that successfully challenged the FCC over George Carlin’s “seven dirty words,” created a special program commemorating the 50th anniversary of the court ruling that deemed Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” not obscene. But the program is being distributed online, not over the air. Bernard White, WBAI p.d., tells the San Francisco Chronicle that broadcasting “Howl Against Censorship” would put the station at risk for $325,000 FCC fines for each “dirty word” in Ginsberg’s poem. “This is about the public airwaves,” says Janet Coleman, WBAI arts director.