Nightly Business Report, acquired last year by businessman Mykalai Kontilai, has hired a lobbyist. Alan Rubin of Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney has registered with Congress to advocate for a Department of Defense education intitative. Kontilai told Current last year that the project entails supplying members of the military with financial educational information. Kontilai’s acquisition of the show in 2010 was big news in the pubcasting system, as reported by both Current and, subsequently, the New York Times.

Longtime public broadcaster Dennis Haarsager, who led NPR in an interim capacity prior to President Vivian Schiller’s arrival, is the new executive director of the Public Television Major Market Group, an influential consortium of pubTV stations from the nation’s 30 largest broadcast markets. He replaces Bill Kobin, the group’s executive director for the last 14 years. Haarsager retired in 2010 from NPR as its senior v.p. of system resources and technology. He previously spent three decades in Pullman, Wash., as associate v.p. and g.m. for Washington State University’s Educational and Public Media, which includes Northwest Public Radio and pubTV stations KWSU and KTNW.

A white paper (PDF)  presented this week to the FCC predicts there will be little need for spectrum givebacks outside the Top 30 TV markets, Broadcast Engineering reports. The study was conducted by CTIA/The Wireless Association and the Consumer Electronics Association, two trade organizations that strongly favor freeing up 120 MHz of spectrum for mobile devices. It also estimates that the federal government could net some $33 billion on the auctions, after compensating broadcasters that surrender licenses and paying for the technology to repack the DTV band.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler writes today (Feb. 18) on the Tehran Bureau, a news site founded in 2008 by Iranian-born and Massachusetts-based Kelly Golnoush Niknejad that entered into an editorial partnership with Frontline in 2009. “Where I have difficulty is in the close and unique association of this relatively new website focused on a single country with Frontline and PBS,” Getler writes. “Tehran Bureau appears online under the Frontline and PBS banners as part of the Frontline site. That looks to me, and I assume to some others who come upon the site, like a big-time stamp of approval from two names that stand for journalistic credibility and distance.”

The JPR Foundation, which supports Jefferson Public Radio in Ashland, Ore., has big plans – $7 million in big plans, to be exact, reports the Mail Tribune in Medford, Ore. The NPR member station will be moving from a basement at Southern Oregon University into an historic 1910 brick warehouse in Medford that was donated to foundation earlier this month. After renovations, in addition to the pubradio offices and studios, the warehouse will contain the Western States Museum of Broadcasting, a cafe and auditorium. JPR also is closing a deal to buy the Holly Theatre in Medford this spring, with plans to remodel the 1930 building.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) today (Feb. 17) unveiled the first public, searchable nationwide map of broadband Internet availability. In an announcement, NTIA said the data will support efforts “to expand broadband access and adoption in communities at risk of being left behind in the 21st century economy and help businesses and consumers seeking information on their high-speed Internet options.”

New White House Press secretary Jay Carney indicated that President Obama puts a priority on noncommercial broadcasting funding, reports Broadcasting & Cable. Carney called the president’s budget, released this week, a road map showing his priorities. A reporter asked Carney if the president saw a “universal American value” in public broadcasting, and he replied, “The budget represents his priorities, and I think you can read into that.” President Obama’s new budget increases funding for CPB from $430 million in FY11 to $445 million in 2012.

Two more of the many opinion pieces circulating on public broadcasting funding: On the side of public media, WGBH President Jon Abbott and his Boston colleague Charles Kravetz, g.m. of WBUR, say sacrificing money for public broadcasting will make little difference in America’s budget woes. “Does the federal deficit need to be addressed? Of course,” they write today (Feb. 17) in the Boston Globe. “But gutting public radio and public television is not the answer. Eliminating the government’s investment in public broadcasting would reduce the $1.5 trillion federal budget deficit by less than three ten-thousandths of one percent.” Stating the case against funding on his blog is Sen.

The amendment from Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Oreg.) restoring CPB funds to the Continuing Resolution under debate in the House was gavelled down on a procedural matter just before midnight last night (Feb. 16). Blumenauer’s Amendment 436 would have provided $460 million in fiscal 2013 CPB funding by doing away with IRS tax breaks on oil or gas wells. Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) raised a point of order that the funding offset was not allowed; the Chair agreed. “It’s not that Democrats tried to do something nonsensical here, it’s that Republicans have set up the rules to tie our hands,” Blumenauer spokesman Derek Schlickeisen told Current.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) told FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski that he has “some dark suspicions” that broadcasters may face mandatory spectrum givebacks for an upcoming auction, reports Broadcasting & Cable. At an FCC oversight hearing in Washington today (Feb. 16), Dingell pushed Genachowski for a yes or no answer as to whether the auction, which will free up bandwidth for mobile devices, will be voluntary. “We haven’t addressed that question,” Genachowski answered. “We’ve proposed a win-win-win incentive auctions that will free up billions of dollars and bring market incentives into spectrum allocations, helping give this country what it needs – a lot more spectrum for mobile broadband.”

Alan Chartock, president of WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, takes on House Republicans  in a strongly worded piece in today’s (Feb. 16) Huffington Post. Why now? “As almost anyone in the system knows, I am probably the most frequent critic of NPR and its leadership,” Chartock writes. “But there are times when you really have to speak up and this is one of them.” His main target is Colorado Rep. Doug Lamborn, who wrote a January op-ed in The Hill calling NPR “a good place to start cutting federal spending.” Chartock criticizes Lamborn’s insistence that “no one can justify paying for services that are widely available in the private market.”

Seven Democratic House members were joined by the PBS Kids character Arthur in a press conference in the breezy sunshine outside the Capitol in Washington today (Feb. 16). Rep. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.) said this latest threat to public broadcasting funding is different from former battles in the mid-’90s and six years ago (Current, June 27, 2005). “Back then, there was a strong, moderate, thoughtful Republican base of support,” he said. “Now there is a partisan undercurrent that is unsettling.” Rep. Ed Markey (Mass.) said because of the importance of local pubstations to their constituents, “there is a razor-sharp edge to this issue back home.”

In the last four days, three progressive organizations have collected more than 1 million signatures opposing the GOP plan to defund public broadcasting. The move to zero out federal support of CPB “is clearly political, not budgetary,” said Timothy Karr, campaign director at Free Press. “Every time the GOP is in power, they offer a new measure to kill public broadcasting. But there’s something they don’t take into consideration—the American people love public broadcasting.” Other groups collecting signatures are are MoveOn.org and CREDO Action. 

If you’re looking for a pitch for public media, marketer Izzy Smith points to an entrancing moment of political theater posted on Public Radio Exchange. Producer Roman Mars retells the story of Fred Rogers’ moment in a 1969 Senate hearing, playing opposite longtime Rhode Island Sen. John Pastore. “It’s like Capra, isn’t it?” Mars comments, but to his credit Mars points out that Pastore was an ally of President Johnson in supporting the fledgling thing called public broadcasting. YouTube has the video, with a young Fred Rogers at the witness table.

It’s unlikely that the House GOP’s push to defund public broadcasting will succeed, according to former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, a potential candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Santorum is a veteran of earlier congressional battles to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s federal appropriation. In an interview on Fox News yesterday, he recalled how it played out: the “Barney contingent came out and the Sesame Street contingent came out, and these are programs that are popular among families and so they hit you pretty hard.” HuffPo and GOP12, a blog covering the 2012 field of Republicans running for president, have video clips.