Groups of senators and representatives wrote to CPB on Friday urging that it delay the appointment of a new president. Twenty-one reps asked CPB to begin a “transparent and nonpartisan search” to fill the job. Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan, Hillary Clinton and Frank Lautenberg questioning board Chairman Ken Tomlinson’s plan to hire the former chief of the Republican party (PDF): “We find it astonishing that [Patricia] Harrison, given her former prominence as a partisan political figure, would be even considered as a candidate for a job that demands that the occupant be nonpolitical.” APTS earlier told CPB it would oppose acts that violate, or appear to violate, pubcasters’ independence.

Through the progressive advocacy website MoveOn.org, more than 769,000 Web users have sent messages to Congress backing pubcasting: “Congress must save NPR, PBS and local public stations. We trust them for in-depth news and educational children’s programming. It’s money well spent.”

The proposed cuts to CPB funding, if enacted, could trigger “a spiral of death for public broadcasting,” said KCPT President Bill Reed on today’s Democracy Now.

A coalition of citizen groups including Common Cause and Free Press has urged CPB Chairman Ken Tomlinson to postpone the board’s vote on a new CPB president, now planned for Monday or Tuesday. The groups’ letter yesterday suggests that Tomlinson’s supposed candidate for the job, State Department official Patricia Harrison, got “inappropriately favorable consideration” because she and Tomlinson have worked together on U.S. propaganda efforts overseas.

The House Appropriations Committee approved a bill last night that cuts pubcasting’s total 2006 funding by more than 40 percent. It would reduce CPB funding from $400 million to $300 million, eliminate the $23 million Ready to Learn program and deny requests for $39 million in digital transition funding and $50 million to replace the aging pubTV satellite system. But the committee approved a Democratic amendment that restores the traditional congressional practice of funding CPB two years in advance, earmarking $400 million for 2008. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) told Reuters he will try to add funding for pubcasting when the bill comes to the House floor.

“The Bush administration is introducing a political agenda to public broadcasting,” writes columnist Molly Ivins. “They are using the lame pretext that PBS is somehow liberal to justify [turning] it into a propaganda organ for the government.”

Stepping in where the Ready to Learn program may be cutting back, CPB has allotted up to $3 million for grants to stations that work with childhood literacy, the corporation announced at pubTV’s National Center for Outreach Conference. Eighty to 100 stations will get “Ready to Lead in Literacy” grants of up to $35,000, said Ken Ferree, acting president. [Text of his remarks.]

Columnist Tom Teepen makes the case for supporting public broadcasting: “Public TV and radio are the anti-crudity media, refuges from the wasteland, a demonstration that mass media don’t have to probe constantly for the lowest common denominator, and a standing rebuke to the commercial media for defaulting on their putative public trust.”

Rhode Island’s attorney general will continue investigating Boston University’s management of its Rhode Island stations, reports the Boston Globe, despite the university’s decision not to sell the stations. ”The motivation behind the decision to sell WRNI was shrouded in secrecy, and the motivation behind the decision not to sell doesn’t seem that much clearer,” said Patrick Lynch.

Investigators from CPB’s Inspector General’s Office are examining payments that the corporation made to two Republican lobbyists who provided “strategic advice” on legislation that would have changed the composition of the CPB Board, according to the New York Times.

NPR is “a better outfit than the people who are running public radio,” says Bob Edwards in the Fairbanks News-Miner. (Via Romenesko.)

The New York Times profiles WNYC’s Radio Rookies program as a new batch of the teen-reported pieces starts airing on the New York station. “The idea was to teach teens a way to introduce themselves to the public, in a way people can listen to and not just turn off because they’re wearing the wrong clothes or talking the wrong way,” says Rookies founder Marianne McCune.

Boston University and WBUR-FM have decided not to sell their pubradio stations in Rhode Island. Coverage in the Providence Journal.

PBS’s revised editorial policy, which the PBS Board formally adopted today, includes a new definition of journalistic objectivity that emphasizes transparency over neutrality. Prior to the board’s vote on the editorial policy, PBS President Pat Mitchell announced that she plans to hire an ombudsman, an expansion of PBS’s editorial oversight that network’s Editorial Standards Review Committee recommended in its report.

Marketplace host David Brown will leave the show July 29 to end his Texas-to-Cali commute, marry and have children. Kai Ryssdal will leave Marketplace Morning Report to take over for Brown.