A proposed auction of television spectrum has now become tangled up in the onerous ongoing debate over raising the debt ceiling, Broadcasting & Cable reports. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took to the Senate floor Wednesday (July 27) to criticize the debt-ceiling plan of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) for including payments to broadcasters as part of incentive auctions that could run into billions of dollars. “Television broadcasters got the spectrum for free,” he said. “Now we’re supposed to ask the taxpayers to give them a billion dollars to give back spectrum that they owe?” Although he corrected that word to own, “his original seemed to better capture the tenor of his criticisms,” B&C notes.

Public TV ratings fave Antiques Roadshow recorded its highest-value appraisal ever on July 23 in Tulsa, Okla. Asian arts expert Lark Mason estimated that a collection of five late 17th-century/early 18th-century Chinese carved rhinoceros horn cups was worth between $1 million and $1.5 million. The owner (above, facing camera), who wants to remain anonymous, was one of 6,000 ticket holders who brought items to the Tulsa Convention Center. He told Mason he began collecting the cups (below right) in the 1970s and had no idea of their value. The second highest-value appraisal recorded by Roadshow was also Chinese: A collection of carved jade bowls, estimated to be worth as much as $1.07 million, was discovered at an appraisal event in 2009 in Raleigh, N.C.

Though it now does without PBS programs, KCET briefly recovered its role as the most-watched public TV station in Los Angeles in June. By last week, however, it was trailing PBS’s new primary outlet, Orange County’s KOCE. Now rebranded as PBS SoCal, KOCE began winning the area’s largest public TV primetime viewership in January, and continued winning through May, measured in gross rating points, according to TRAC Media Services. It was PBS SoCal’s June pledge drive — 19 days long — that brought it down, says TRAC analyst Craig Reed. Among the four pubTV stations in the market, KCET took 38 percent of the gross rating points and second-ranking PBS SoCal had 32 percent.

CPB is backing development of Essential Public Media, the nonprofit whose purchase of Pittsburgh’s WDUQ is pending before the FCC. At the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference July 14, CPB President Patricia Harrison announced a $250,000 grant to help Essential establish its digital journalism newsroom. “We are confident this will be a model for public media news operations across the country,” she said. Essential began managing day-to-day operations of WDUQ July 1, adopting an all-news format and reducing jazz programming to a six-hour weekend slot on its FM channel while it plays its syndicated service JazzWorks full-time on the Web and on an HD Radio digital multicast channel.

The latest station to leave PBS is a production powerhouse, but one not fully integrated into the nation’s English-dominated public TV system. Puerto Rico TV — WIPR, licensed to Puerto Rico Public Broadcasting Corp., which is controlled by the commonwealth government — dropped its PBS membership July 1. The station in San Juan sometimes produces up to nine hours of content a day, including public affairs, culture, sports, music, talk and food shows, as well as the island’s only 24/7 news channel, all in Spanish. It aired only the children’s shows from the PBS lineup, including the limited number with a Spanish SAP (secondary audio program) soundtrack.

Fox News analyst Juan Williams is back in the news — promoting his new book Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate, which tells his version of events that led to his abrupt dismissal as an NPR analyst last October. Former NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard, whose tenure of as the listeners’ representative at NPR coincided with a heavy volume of complaints about Williams’s dual news analyst roles at Fox News and NPR, has written two pieces reacting to Muzzled, which hit booksellers’ stands on July 26. On Poynter.org, Shepard fact-checks Williams’s one-sided account of his increasingly tenuous relationship with NPR brass.

A preview version of the upcoming PBS Food website went online today (July 25), according to the PBS Station Products and Innovation blog. The site is aiming to “unite cooking shows, blogs and recipes from PBS and local stations across the country.” First up are its two Fresh Tastes bloggers. Jenna Weber graduated from Le Cordon Bleu in 2008 and has worked as a pastry chef, bread baker and freelance food editor; she also blogs at EatLiveRun.com. Marc Matsumoto is a food blogger and photographer at websites NoRecipes.com and WanderingCook.com, whose worked has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

The vast majority of stations responding to the University Station Alliance’s most recent economic survey reported that they’re not likely to be sold or make changes in their governance structure this year. Of 141 stations responding to USA’s fourth annual survey, 88.4 percent indicated that station sales or other ownership changes were not under consideration. Only a handful of stations indicated that talks of consolidation (4 percent), local management agreements (4 percent) or frequency sales (5 percent) were in the works, according to the survey. It was conducted among public radio licensees earlier this summer; a few respondents also operate public TV stations.

“Outreach is about changing somebody else. Engagement is when you have been changed,” says Mikel Ellcessor, g.m. of WDET in Detroit. “And we have to be open to being changed as a result of these activities.” “If you’re truly listening to the community,” he continues, “you’ll learn something you didn’t expect, and you’ll have to rethink your position or approach. We still retain the editorial decision-making and control, but we’re opening our minds to consider that there are things that matter to people that we may not know about. If we’re really listening and willing to get new information and be challenged, that’s both good reporting and true engagement.”

No hard feelings in evidence, the New Jersey Network’s nonprofit fundraising group said last week it will help raise production money for NJTV, NJN’s successor operated by an affiliate of New York’s WNET. “They will take the lead with underwriting — I’m happy to let them keep doing that,” says Neal Shapiro, president of WNET and chair of NJTV, who adds that there may be occasions when NJTV and WNET’s New York stations might sell underwriting together. Meanwhile, NJTV’s new staff, with help from WNET’s, will handle member/viewer fundraising. Indeed, WNET’s staff will provide many services to the new operation, enabling NJTV to operate with about 20 staffers in New Jersey, compared with NJN’s staff of about 130.

Thirteen current staff positions and eight vacant positions are being eliminated at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Va., and six “new or restructured” positions will be added, PBS President Paula Kerger said in a letter to the system July 13. Kerger blamed the “ongoing economic challenges faced by our system” and said PBS made the changes “to focus efforts in areas with the greatest value to the public media system in a time of budgetary constraints.” PBS declined to verify individual departures or say what departments are affected. Several changes center on programming, which is “a key priority of the FY12 Strategic Plan,” Kerger’s letter said, “and part of a multiyear effort to transform PBS’ primetime lineup in order to grow audience and increase the amount of time viewers watch PBS programs.”

Applicants for thousands of FM translators may have to reapply if the FCC goes through with its proposal to give new low-power FM stations a chance to compete for the same frequencies. In a July 12 Notice of Proposed Rule Making, the FCC asked for public feedback on a proposal to resolve a years-old backlog of applications for FM translators — low-power stations that relay the signals of full-power FM stations. The commission began a long hiatus from granting translator licenses in 2005 due to concerns that the new relay transmitters could crowd out potential LPFMs, a newer category of 100-watt noncommercial FMs introduced to originate programming.

As public broadcasting braces for expected cuts from its most predictable revenue source — the annual CPB appropriation — system leaders are talking as much about saving money as raising more of it. Collaboration and consolidation — ideals that pubcasters have long espoused but rarely implemented — were buzzwords at this month’s Public Media Marketing and Development Conference in Pittsburgh. Top fundraisers, station execs and analysts urged their peers to tear down walls that separate local stations and cooperate to preserve and strengthen audience service.  Keynoters Fred and Paul Jacobs, sibling radio consultants from Detroit, delivered the starkest diagnosis and most urgent prescription — formation of a commission to analyze station finances and design a restructured, pared-down system of stations.

Robert Aubry Davis is not painfully shy. He does pledge breaks for Washington’s WETA-TV, after all. For the winter holidays, local media report, Davis will follow in the large and dainty footsteps of Harvey Fierstein to perform the motherly role of Edna Turnblad in the Tony-Award-winning musical version of John Waters’ “Hairspray,” opening Nov. 21 at the highly touted Signature Theater, just down the street from WETA’s headquarters in Arlington, Va. The late drag spectacle Divine originated the role in Waters’ earlier movie. Davis, a longtime WETA-FM personality and now a deejay on Sirius XM Satellite Radio, also hosts and produces Millenium of Music, the program of pre-Baroque works syndicated to many pubradio stations and aired on Sirius XM and Radio Netherlands Worldwide.

Marathon swimmer and KCRW commentator Diana Nyad, 61 years old, is getting ready to swim for 60 hours over 103 miles across the shark-infested Straits of Florida from Cuba to Key West. Nyad attempted this swim once before, unsuccessfully, in 1978 at the age of 28. “Physically, I am much stronger than I was before, although I was faster in my 20s,” Nyad tells the New York Times. “I feel strong, powerful, and endurance-wise, I’m fit.” Her plans to swim last summer were postponed due to visa difficulties.