A Baltimore Sun article attempts to capture the frantic activity behind the scenes at A Prairie Home Companion.

The Associated Press profiles Tavis Smiley, host of a new show on NPR.

As Maryland PTV readies its new Wall Street Week for debut on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reports that former host Louis Rukeyser has taken three of its four underwriters and kept airtime on public TV stations serving 60 percent of the population.

TV critic Tom Shales refuses to donate “money to a ‘public’ TV that has been privatized within an inch of its life,” according to his Electronic Media column.

After its “Stupid Pills” wear off, PBS moves Masterpiece Theatre back to Sunday nights, says Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post.

Last year was a good year for the Independent Television Service. ITVS had weathered its first 10 years as a funder and presenter of independent productions for public TV. It was feted with retrospectives at museums and film festivals across the country, which highlighted such fare as The Farmer’s Wife, La Ciudad, First Person Plural, The Devil Never Sleeps and Still Life with Animated Dogs. And it brought in a new executive director, Sally Jo Fifer. Having worked nine years as executive director of the nonprofit Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), Fifer was uniquely qualified to steer the difficult course between stations and independents.

Slate critic Virginia Heffernan on PBS’s animated Sagwa: “Surprisingly, Sagwa gets away with refinement and high-mindedness . . .”

AP trumpets Ken Burns’ new series of repeats on PBS Monday nights.

We should not be surprised that most of television enters our people and our body politic, not as food for thought, but as an embalming fluid, a relaxing and displacing system of entertainment for those too exhausted, inert or numb to want more. But our place — your place, my place, the place of public television — is to offer an alternative to that, to serve the actual young and the forever young, the open and curious, those who still want to learn.

There’s a burden resting on the broad shoulders of this man who’s bopping his head to a funky beat, tongue out in a soulful pout, enjoying himself before launching into the next segue. Tavis Smiley is at a studio mike, grooving to bumper music between segments on a recent installment of his morning show, broadcast today from NPR’s Washington headquarters instead of his Los Angeles digs, because he’s in town for the Public Radio Conference. Smiley has polished off a double interview about U.S. policy on Cuba. Coming up, he’ll elicit a string of outrageous jokes from comedian Dick Gregory in a comedy feature that’s a regular part of his Friday shows.

NPR will reconsider its linking policy in the wake of its widespread blogger-led condemnation.

KPFX is a new, Web-only Pacifica radio station, cousin to KPFK in Los Angeles. (Via Walker, below.)

Jesse Walker, writing in Salon, updates us on nascent efforts within the Pacifica network to revitalize its five stations.

Have you linked to NPR’s website without permission? You’ll have to “live with the guilt forever,” NPR ombud Jeffrey Dvorkin tells Wired. (Update: The Poynter Institute’s Steve Outing joins the tide regarding the linking policy. His verdict: stupid.)

Bloggers galore are thumbing their noses at NPR and violating its anti-linking policy. (See entry below.) Here’s a list of who’s doing it. (Update: the spanking continues ad infinitum at Slashdot.) (Via randomWalks.)