The FCC is siding with WHDD-FM — tiny Robin Hood Radio — in Sharon, Conn., in a complaint filed last year by a local assistant schools superintendent. Diane Goncalves wrote to the FCC that on multiple occasions station co-founder Marshall Miles broadcast endorsements of candidates and criticized specific members of the Region 1 Board of Education, actions that Goncalves contended were violations of the Communications Act of 1934. Miles answered that complaint with the FCC on Jan. 13, saying the statements were identified on the air as his personal opinion. Goncalves also filed an answer to that letter. In a decision on March 30, the FCC agreed, saying that Miles “should take care in the future that your personal views over the air continue to be clearly labeled as such.”

In a three-hour public hearing presided over by a former Washington State Supreme Court Chief Justice, the 11-member Washington News Council mainly sided with the anti-abortion Vitae Foundation in its dispute with KUOW-FM over an April 2011 story, CPB Ombudsman Joel Kaplan reports. The reporter from the Seattle pubradio news station had a journalistic responsibility to contact representatives of the Foundation before the story ran, the Council said in a unanimous vote. Also, the Council decided the story contained errors that merited on-air correction. However, the Council sided 10-1 with the station that it did not have a responsibility to provide the Foundation additional on-air coverage after the original story.

Kartemquin Films has announced the initial 15 members of its PBS Needs Indies Steering Committee, which the Chicago doc house is establishing to serve as a liaison between independent filmmakers and PBS. Names include International Documentary Association Board Member Beth Bird, and Michael Winship, senior writer of Moyers & Company with Bill Moyers. The group also posted a second open letter to PBS; its first garnered more than 1,000 signatures after PBS shifted indie showcases Independent Lens and P.O.V. from Tuesdays to Thursdays, resulting in ratings and carriage drops (Current, March 12). “This incident has renewed our community’s awareness of the critical value of PBS to the national media ecology,” the group said in the latest letter.

The Radio Arts Foundation-St. Louis has applied to the FCC for a new classical station, according to the Post-Dispatch. The group had provided “considerable financial support,” the newspaper said, to the former local favorite Classic 99, KFUO-FM, and had attempted to purchase that station from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in 2009 before its sale to a Christian pop-music station in July 2010. The Foundation hopes to broadcast on analog radio and an HD-2 channel and stream live on the Internet. Plans also include live music performances from a new facility with two broadcast studios and a conference room that will double as a performance space.

Legislation to save the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority “narrowly squeaked out of a Senate panel” on Tuesday (April 4), reports the Tulsa World. With the crucial vote tied 4-4, Sen. Bill Brown changed his nay to a yay. “I did not realize this sunset bill means OETA could not even go out and raise private money,” he said. “This is not an appropriations bill. It just keeps them operating. My stance changes on that because my deal is that I would love to see them go out and raise private money and operate as a private company. But if this bill doesn’t pass, they don’t even make that.

Programming on PBS and NPR won nine honors in this year’s Peabody Awards, announced on a webcast this morning (April 4). Public television winners: American Experience, for what the judges called “three exceptional documentaries . . . under the banner of this grand American history anthology,” Triangle Fire, Freedom Riders and Stonewall Uprising; indie showcases P.O.V. for My Perestroika and Independent Lens for Bhutto; and American Masters for Charles and Ray Eames – The Architect and the Painter. Austin City Limits from KLRU-TV “receives a rare Institutional Peabody Award,” the judges said. “Thirty-seven seasons on air make it the world’s longest running live music television program.”

Wilbur Herrington, the founding station engineer of University of Georgia’s WUOG-FM, died March 29 of a malignant brain tumor. He had been involved with the station in Athens since its founding in October 1972. “I can honestly say that Wilbur was, and very much will always continue to be, the heart and soul of WUOG,” Operations Director Akeeme Martin told the student newspaper, Red &Black. “He was fiercely proud of his spotless professional record, and the fact that the FCC never had to inspect WUOG,” said Tommy McGahee, a 2009 Georgia grad who worked Herrington. “He kept that station up and running for over three decades.”

The Media Access Project, a nonprofit public interest law firm and communications policy advocacy organization, is suspending operations May 1 after nearly 40 years, reports Deadline New York. Andrew Jay Schwartzman, its longtime leader, told the site that MAP “ran out of money.” In an announcement, the MAP Board said it reached the decision “after evaluating the difficult funding environment facing MAP and other progressive public interest groups.” The organization “achieved victories and accomplishments in proceedings that affect almost every aspect of the Federal Communications Commission’s activities,” the announcement said. Media reform advocates were quick to react. Craig Aaron, president of Free Press, praised MAP’s “trailblazing work,” and noted: “MAP earned some of the greatest victories for the movement with its key role in protecting media ownership rules and in securing space on the dial for Low Power FM radio.

WFMU manager and digital music pioneer Ken Freedman will receive the National Association of Community Broadcasters’ 2012 Bader Award. The award, to be presented in June during the Community Radio conference, honors individuals and organizations for single innovations or lifetime contributions to community radio. It’s presented in memory of the late Michael Bader, an attorney who was a fierce advocate for community radio. “Ken Freedman has been well ahead of the technological curve and need for innovation in public radio long before it was ‘fashionable,’” said Sue Matters of KWSO, Warm Springs, Ore., NFCB board chair. She described Freedman as a “stunning example of the trend set in motion by Michael Bader many ‘radio dials’ ago.”

WTCI is asking the Chattanooga City Council for $250,000 to develop a multicast channel with 24/7 local programming, “Voyager.” Station President Paul Grove told Current that the station will use the sum as seed money to attract additional foundation and corporate support. He expects a council vote on the funding later this summer. On its 45.2 channel, WTCI currently runs Create, state legislature coverage and regional high-school and college sports. Grove wants to expand that to offer live coverage of city councils in the region and their committee work, host issue-oriented town-hall meetings at the station for broadcast, launch a half-hour weekly arts and culture show and run local documentaries — all in addition to the five ongoing weekly series the station already produces.

Tom Dollenmayer, former station manager of WUSF pubTV and radio in Tampa, Fla., has assumed that role at WFDD-FM at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Denise Franklin, who had been at the station for 11 years, departed as g.m. March 22. According to the local Business Journal, Franklin had been involved in recruiting and selecting Dollenmayer to fill the spot, which is a new position at the station. A decision about whether to hire a g.m. will be made after Dollenmayer settles in, station spokesperson Molly Davis told the publication.

A consultant who evaluated the performance of seven CPB-backed Local Journalism Centers has recommended that CPB continue funding the multimedia startups for another year. But interactive-media consultant Rusty Coats advised CPB to qualify its continued support for LJCs by requiring the centers to adopt a set of best practices. These would help guide the centers through the more challenging aspects of their work, such as collaborating in multiplatform fundraising and media production. In his evaluation of the seven regional LJCs launched with CPB aid in 2010, Coats found that four are performing relatively well, but the remainder struggle with issues of collaboration and long-term sustainability.

The University of Southern California is buying San Jose-area commercial radio station KCNL for $7.5 million to add to its Classical Public Radio Network, reports Radio Survivor. Currently KCNL airs a Spanish-language paid-programming talk format. The sale is “big news” for CPRN, “which has been vocal about its desire to expand its programming into the South Bay area,” the site notes. USC hopes to begin airing classical programming on KCNL in advance of the license transfer through a lease management agreement. USC also filed a request with the FCC to change the status of KCNL from commercial to noncom after the license transfer.

“On Shaky Ground,” a collaborative news report from nonprofit news organization California Watch and KQED in San Francisco, has won an IRE Medal, the highest award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. The judges called it “an extraordinary effort examining seismic safeguards in place to protect California’s schoolchildren from earthquakes,” with “astonishing breadth, depth and creativity.” Stories were published in more than 150 news outlets and translated into four languages, and video segments appeared in every major California media market. Another pubmedia collaboration, among ProPublica, NPR and Frontline, received an award for multiplatform reporting. The judges called  “Post Mortem: Death Investigation in America” a “hard-driving investigation into this little-understood part of the criminal justice system.”

PBS NewsHour will air a segment tonight (April 2) on concussions in youth football that former Dateline NBC correspondent Stone Phillips had reported and posted on his website. According to the New York Times, Neal Shapiro, president of WNET in New York, brought the report to the attention of Linda Winslow, NewsHour e.p. Phillips suffered two concussions as a high school and college football player. He paid to produce his own news report on the topic. The segment is about 14 minutes long and features on-camera interviews with researchers. It’s his first since leaving Dateline in 2007. “I did not have any plans for it to be broadcast,” Phillips said.