CPB Ombudsman Ken Bode responds to criticisms of the PBS program Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories, “[T]his broadcast is so slanted as to raise suspicions that either the family courts of America have gone crazy or there must be another side to the story.”

Online Journalism Review‘s Mark Glaser examines NPR’s podcasting strategy and, in a signoff from OJR, notes that he’s working with PBS.org.

WFMU’s blog links to a video of Barney “channeling Tupac Shakur.”

Nova‘s recent special on New Orleans, The Storm that Drowned a City, was too easy on the Bush administration, writes author Paul Loeb in a WorkingForChange critique.

“China is a singularly difficult story to tell because there is SO MUCH good and SO MUCH bad all happening simultaneously,” says Rob Gifford, who covers China for NPR, in an interview with Leonard Witt.

In the New York Times today and the Washington Post yesterday editorialists derided former CPB Chair Ken Tomlinson — in the Times as a “disastrous zealot” and in the Post as “a triumph of ‘politics over good judgment'”. They followed similar views published in the Toledo Blade and elsewhere. Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, however, said the true scandal is that taxpayers are “conscripted” to pay for media.

NPR’s Anne Garrels tells the Hartford Courant about traveling with a company of Marines in Iraq: “[T]hey were so disappointed that I was NPR. They didn’t know what NPR was, but they wanted Fox!” (Via Romenesko.)

In a feature at Poynter.org, NPR’s Bill Marimow and Daniel Zwerdling share stories of how their work has made a difference.

The future of KUT-FM in Austin, Texas, includes a major fundraising effort and the possibility of a different relationship to its university parent, reports the Austin Chronicle.

The New York Times checks in with a high school radio station in Indianapolis whose license was challenged by a religious broadcaster. Dozens of stations around the country have faced similar challenges in recent years.

Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories, a PBS documentary about domestic abuse, has come under a withering blogosphere attack for unfairly vilifying fathers. Men’s advocacy groups and experts co-signed a letter to PBS challenging the film’s journalistic rigor and one of the fathers named in the film threatened to sue for libel. Op-eds published by Fox News and the Boston Globe this week comment on the controversy. Glenn Sacks, a columnist and advocate for men’s rights, leads the e-mail campaign, and has published court documents that paint a different picture of a mother portrayed heroicly in Breaking the Silence.

The Senate Democratic leadership has asked the White House to appoint a Senate alumnus, David H. Pryor of Arkansas, to one of the two vacancies on the nine-seat CPB Board. The former senator is dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Pryor would fill a long-vacant seat reserved for a non-Republican under a provision of the Public Broadcasting Act that requires the CPB Board to be bipartisan. The Bush administration refused to nominate an earlier Democratic candidate for the seat, media studies professor Chon Noriega. The other vacant seat probably would be filled by a Republican.

“I just think that Ira and radio are too perfect a fit to be applied to television very effectively,” says Robert Siegel of This American Life‘s Ira Glass. “But I’d be happy to be proved wrong.”

Glenn Mitchell, a talk show host and 30-year veteran of KERA-FM in Dallas, Texas, died Sunday morning at the age of 55.

CPB Inspector General Kenneth A. Konz says he will open an inquiry into whether public TV and radio stations used federal funds to urge listeners and viewers to lobby Congress in response to last summer’s proposed funding cuts.The investigation, first reported by Bloomberg News, was requested in August by 18 Republican lawmakers led by Ginny Brown-Waite (R-Fla.), Konz told Current. The request was in response to stations’ successful campaign in June to rally opposition to $100 million in proposed cuts to CPB’s $400 million appropriation for fiscal 2006. The House restored the full appropriation after pubcasting fans decried the proposed cuts in calls to legislators.