Fox News Channel will air the CPB-funded doc Islam vs. Islamists on Saturday (9 p.m. Eastern time), with wraparound material in PBS style, Fox announced today. In the wraparound, Fox will interview the program’s producers about their conflicts with PBS, which refused to distribute the film without further revision. Think-tank pundit and co-producer Frank Gaffney says PBS wanted “to bring more of an Islamist flavor” to his film. Exec producers of CPB’s Crossroads series at WETA said the film’s warnings about Islamist influence were alarmist and unsupported, and omitted it from the initial series aired by PBS in April. The DVD is selling for just under $25, including shipping.

Judy Critchton, the founding executive producer of American Experience, died Oct. 14 at age 77, the New York Times reported. She succumbed to complications of leukemia. Crichton talked about the state of the documentary arts in 1997, after retiring from the program.

After Stephen Colbert announced last week on CNN’s Larry King that he might be running for president (on Republican and Democratic tickets), South Carolina ETV invited Colbert to formally announce his campaign on its air. South Carolina is Colbert’s home state. Colbert’s byline appeared Sunday in the New York Times, apparently the result of Maureen Dowd’s dare that he write an Op-Ed. In his column, Colbert discusses his presidential aspirations and writes “I want to return to a simpler America where we ate our meat off the end of a sharpened stick.”

Pittsburgh’s WDUQ-FM stopped running underwriting credits for Planned Parenthood (essentially, ceased accepting donations from an abortion-rights advocate) on orders from its licensee, the Catholic-run Duquesne University, the Post-Gazette reported today. In a loosely analogous case 10 years ago, a federal court ruled that a Missouri university had the right to reject Ku Klux Klan underwriting on KWMU-FM, St. Louis.

During its Oct. 12-19 filing window for new noncommercial FM stations, the Federal Communications Commission will allow single entities to file no more than ten applications, according to a public notice issued this afternoon. The ten-application limit is “consistent with the localism and diversity goals reflected in the NCE FM point system and appropriately balances our goals of deterring speculative filings, facilitating the expeditious processing of window-filed applications with limited commission resources, and providing interested parties with a meaningful opportunity to file for NCE FM new stations,” the commission said in the notice.

NPR’s new chief operating officer is Mitch Praver, a new-media exec with top-level experience at National Geographic and Discovery Communications. He’ll take charge of the network’s daily operations. Since leaving NGS in 2004, Praver managed an AOL unit that integrated AOL Instant Messenger into the online service and most recently ran business development and sales for Hillcrest Labs, developer of the Freespace interface technology used in the Logitech Air Mouse. The appointment was announced today by CEO Ken Stern.

A New York Times editorial on broadcasters’ growing tendency to self-censor points to weak-kneed decisions by public broadcasters: WBAI’s retreat from broadcasting Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” and PBS’s editing of swear-words from The War.

The Virginian-Pilot reports that Minnesota Public Radio is suing a Christian rock station in Virginia Beach over its use of the name “The Current,” which is the brand name of MPR’s Triple-A music service.

San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre concluded in an Oct. 3 report (PDF) that the city’s KPBS-FM/TV is violating PBS’s balance and objectivity standards after canceling Full Focus, a daily public affairs show. “The lack of balance and objectivity in KPBS-produced programming clearly contravenes PBS Editorial Standards and Policies,” he wrote. Aguirre also took issue with the selection of hosts for Editors Roundtable, another public affairs show, but stopped short of proposing penalties for KPBS or asking the station to rectify the situation. KPBS News Director Michael Marcotte responds: “Taking Full Focus off the air was certainly a loss for our community –- because he’s right when he says it was one of the few sources of balanced, in-depth civic discourse on San Diego television.

Frontline announced its new fall lineup on PBS, beginning Oct. 16 with “Cheney’s Law.” Other doc subjects: America’s relationship with Iran, the business of being an undertaker, the Darfur crisis, and CIA kidnapping of terror suspects (Frontline/World). [See a preview video.]

A measure of how far the cultural battle over broadcast indecency has shifted: New York’s WBAI, the Pacifica station that successfully challenged the FCC over George Carlin’s “seven dirty words,” created a special program commemorating the 50th anniversary of the court ruling that deemed Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” not obscene. But the program is being distributed online, not over the air. Bernard White, WBAI p.d., tells the San Francisco Chronicle that broadcasting “Howl Against Censorship” would put the station at risk for $325,000 FCC fines for each “dirty word” in Ginsberg’s poem. “This is about the public airwaves,” says Janet Coleman, WBAI arts director.

In a follow-up to another mini-flap involving NPR’s Juan Williams, someone at the network leaked an internal memo (via mediabistro.com) from news director Ellen Weiss explaining NPR’s decision to reject an opportunity to interview President Bush. The network declined the White House offer because President Bush would only speak to Williams and NPR doesn’t let subjects dictate who interviews them, Weiss said last week. Williams instead conducted the interview for Fox News (transcript, via Dan Froomkin, video at FoxNews.com), where he is a regular commentator. In the memo released today, Weiss explained that NPR rebuffed a similar offer from Sen.

NPR’s Juan Williams has been sucked into the media feud over Bill O’Reilly’s racial awareness. Bloggers for Media Matters and the Nation argue that Williams has discredited himself and NPR by defending O’Reilly. Video of Williams’ recent appearance on O’Reilly Factor is posted here [scroll down to “Middle Man” headline]. An AP video with audio excerpts of O’Reilly’s original remarks about his dinner at Sylvia’s, the Harlem soul food restaurant, is here.

HD will be the battle cry for cable nets and competing satellite TV operators during the next year, said Phillip Swann of TVPredictions.com yesterday, issuing his annual 10 HD predictions for ’08 at Iowa PTV’s DTV Symposium. DirecTV will offer 100 HD channels, he foretold, but consumers will remain confused about what equipment they’d need to receive true HD, and many will buy $300 standard-def DTV receivers. Iowa Public Radio programmer Todd Mundt reacts to Swann at the symposium, confiding that, since installing an HD set, he has “grown to dislike watching” standard-def programs, and feels little allure from multicast SD channels.

Philadelphia magazine runs a long, occasionally snide piece on WHYY and its well-compensated CEO, Bill Marrazzo. The writer takes aim at the station’s perceived “lack of ambition to do public television” as well as Marrazzo’s $400,000+ salary, and outlines mostly anonymous employees’ concerns about both issues. The WHYY Board defended Marrazzo’s performance and compensation in August in response to another local writer’s criticism.