Listen to Current Senior Editor Karen Everhart‘s Feb. 18 appearance on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (RealAudio).

“We like to have fun with the show and we like to be adventurous, but at bottom, we want to urgently illuminate what the hell is going on in this world,” says On Point host Tom Ashbrook in the BU Bridge.

Minneapolis Public Schools has rebuffed offers from Minnesota Public Radio to buy KBEM-FM, the school district’s financially troubled jazz station, reports the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

CPB President Kathleen Cox tells the Washington Post that, contrary to what PBS President Pat Mitchell and her spokeswoman have said, Cox did not confer with Mitchell on whether to withdraw “Sugartime!,” the Postcards from Buster program depicting Vermont children with two mommies. “[T]he first I heard from her was after she made that decision, explaining that she had made the decision after receiving the Spellings letter,” Cox says.

“We feel strongly that the language of war should not be sanitized and that there is nothing indecent about its use in this context.” In a memo to public TV stations, producers of Frontline ask them to take a stand for the First Amendment by airing a documentary that includes the real language of soldiers in combat [via Romenesko].

The New York Times reports that PBS’s identity crisis goes far deeper than the announcement by Pat Mitchell that she would step down next year as the beleaguered network’s president.

“I just wanted to make clear that I’ve got 15 months left on this job and let’s make this as constructive as we can,” says PBS President Pat Mitchell in a Washington Post column that links her announcement that she’ll leave PBS next year to her handling of the Buster “two mommies” program.

CPB is accepting applications for the next funding round for digital radio conversion. The deadline is April 29.

Pat Mitchell announced that she will leave her job as PBS president when her contract expires next year. News accounts in the New York Times and New York Post tie Mitchell’s exit to her controversial decision to pull an episode of Postcards from Buster that featured children with lesbian parents.

For lovers of classical music, these are difficult times. Once pubradio’s dominant format, classical music is still widespread on the airwaves. As of fall 2002, 340 public stations aired a “very significant” amount of classical each week, according to a Minnesota Public Radio report on the genre. But news programs from NPR and other sources have been pushing symphonies and operas off stage. News eclipsed classical in 2000 as public radio’s most prevalent format and more and more stations have been shearing hours of the music from their schedules. Dozens have eliminated it from middays. Sagging ratings prompted WFDD in Winston-Salem, N.C.,

PBS President Pat Mitchell tells the Los Angeles Times that she’s troubled by criticisms from liberal advocacy groups. “They are our natural allies and friends,” she said. “I’d expect them to be more understanding.”

CPB seeks a producer for a daily 4-6 hour Native music program that will be part of the American Indian Radio on Satellite (AIROS) feed.

WETA-FM in Washington, D.C., will switch to a news/talk format Feb. 28. The Washington Post‘s Marc Fisher accuses WETA and public radio at large of adopting “the commercial model of going for the biggest possible audience.”

In a letter to Congress, the National Association of Broadcasters restates its longstanding support of existing channel protections limiting the licensing of low-power FM stations.

PBS has launched an internal review to find out why the gay mommies episode of Postcards from Buster took so many people by surprise — especially the show’s main funder, the U.S. Department of Education, and numerous aggravated conservatives. Two weeks after new Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings blasted the children’s program for depicting same-sex parental couples, Minnesota conservatives were urging the state legislature to slash aid to Twin Cities PTV for airing the “Sugartime!” episode. Though PBS dropped the episode Jan. 25, mere hours before receiving Spellings’ searing letter, a quarter of public TV’s licensees — 46 of about 170 — have aired the show or plan to.