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.

The CPB inspector general’s harshly critical report on Kenneth Tomlinson is not the only scrutiny the former CPB Board chairman is facing. Tomlinson is also under investigation by the State Department Inspector General’s Office for what he’s done as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Meanwhile, two other agencies overseen by the BBG are embroiled in controversies both public and private. The fledgling Arab-language TV channel Alhurra is the subject of three separate government investigations (by the State Department, a House International Relations subcommittee and the Government Accountability Office). And journalists at Voice of America are assailing their BBG-appointed boss for trying to tilt news stories more favorably toward the Bush administration.

Friday afternoon, things changed for producers who need to use somebody else’s footage and music in their documentaries. Clearing rights may still cost a lot and take too much time, as in the past, but Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi believe producers now have a solid rationale for not paying excessive and confounding fees for copyrighted materials in certain cases. On Nov. 18 [2005], the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, the Independent Documentary Association, public TV’s Independent Television Service and the series P.O.V., and other media groups endorsed a Statement of Best Practices defining four kinds of situations when a producer, under the “fair use” provisions of copyright law, need not pay for a film clip, a shot of a painting or a snatch of music.

The same week former CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson resigned from the CPB Board, public TV stations received a low-key announcement that the Wall Street Journal would soon end production of the conservative news analysis series he aggressively championed. Journal Editorial Report, which Tomlinson saw as an antidote to Bill Moyers’ provocative liberal commentaries on Now, will wrap its final PBS program Dec. 2. The controversy over how it came to PBS — especially as details of the process were revealed last week — demonstrated that when politics enters pubTV editorial decisions, none of the players emerges unscathed. Producers for Dow Jones Television, an affiliate of the Journal, initially didn’t explain why they canned the show, but in an unsigned op-ed Nov.

Inspector General Kenneth A. Konz found fault with much of former Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson’s balance crusade, but his report did validate the creation of CPB’s ombudsmen, the corporation’s stated tool for dealing with audience concerns about program balance and objectivity. While Konz criticized the unilateral manner in which Tomlinson selected veteran journalists Ken Bode and William Schulz, he concluded that “by expanding the public’s ability to have issues of objectivity and balance addressed,” the addition of ombudsmen was “consistent with” CPB’s responsibilities. “The legislative statute requires that public broadcasting be objective and balanced,” Chair Cheryl Halpern told reporters in September. “The ombudsmen were put in place to [help] CPB function within the constraints of the legislation.”

Adding conservative voices “appropriately diversified” the PBS lineup, the Houston Chronicle editorialized Nov. 19, but former CPB Chairman Ken Tomlinson unnecessarily created a scandal with his secretive campaign for balance. “Thanks to his improper consultations with the White House … Tomlinson forfeited any claim as a crusader for fairness. Public broadcasting was meant to give Americans respite from the handiwork of political hacks.”

The CPB Board induced former President Robert Coonrod to extend his time in office by giving him a four-year consulting contract worth nearly $500,000 and starting after he left CPB, the New York Times reported this morning. Because the CPB president’s salary is capped by Congress (he was paid $174,000), the contract could raise political hackles. The board also agreed to pay his successor as president, Kathleen Cox, more than $600,000 as severance, a CPB spokesman told Current. Now the Times reports that CPB may withhold part of her settlement.

Public radio is hitting home runs, but it can do better. Producer and StoryCorps founder Dave Isay says public radio is entering its golden age.

What could Congress, CPB or anyone do to prevent the conflicts, failed decisions and other embarrassments bubbling out of the Tomlinson affair? Perhaps the central problem is that the Public Broadcasting Act tells CPB, run by well-connected political appointees, to protect public broadcasting from political influence while also fostering objectivity and balance on the air. While CPB’s inspector general and many others criticize former CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson for violating the first mandate, he and his supporters at the Wall Street Journal still say he was only doing his duty under the other. Though APTS proposes several reforms at CPB, eliminating this central conflict of interest is not one of them.

Citing the Freedom of Information Act, three citizen watchdog groups petitioned CPB President Pat Harrison Nov. 21, 2005, to release certain documents mentioned in the CPB inspector general’s Nov. 15 report on the Tomlinson affair. Included are materials given privately by the IG to the CPB Board and members of Congress, minutes of closed and open CPB Board meetings for three years and communications with the White House and with producers of Tucker Carlson Unfiltered and Journal Editorial Report. Several days earlier the groups had requested similar information without invoking FOIA. The groups also petitioned the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency chaired by former CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson.

Kenneth Y. Tomlinson repeatedly violated provisions of both the Public Broadcasting Act and the corporation’s guidelines for board members’ behavior, according to the report of a six-month internal investigation released Nov. 15 [2005]. Tomlinson, who resigned from the CPB Board earlier this month, meddled in programming decisions, injected politics into hiring procedures and ignored contracting guidelines, CPB Inspector General Kenneth A. Konz found. The report spurred another round of press coverage focusing on an institution that, until this spring, flew mostly under the Washington press corps radar. The inspector general’s findings substantiated much of the early press coverage. Konz found that many of Tomlinson’s actions in his campaign against liberal bias — hiring a content monitor to review Now with Bill Moyers and other pubcasting shows, pushing for creation of Journal Editorial Report and hiring ombudsmen—exceeded “the oversight role of a board member in making procurement and programming decisions.”