In a speech at Washington’s National Press Club yesterday, PBS President Paula Kerger touted new digital media as a means for public TV to “take our service to a new level.” But “bias was the first topic raised during a question-and-answer session,” reports the Washington Times.

Louisiana’s legislative auditor released a report [PDF file] yesterday that said Louisiana Public Broadcasting, a state-funded public TV network, illegally deposited $11 million over three years in accounts held by its private non-profit, the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting. Leaders of the three boards with oversight over LPB and its fundraising non-profits challenged the auditor’s controversial conclusions. “[W]e will guard jealously every dollar donated to LPB and will not allow it to be diverted for any other purpose,” they said in a statement. “There is not even a hint of allegation that any LPB funds were spent in an inappropriate manner,” said Joe Traigle, chairman of the foundation, in today’s Baton Rouge Advocate.

Pacific Public Radio, operator of KKJZ-FM, the major jazz station in the Los Angeles area, is asking fans to urge license-holding California State University at Long Beach to renew its contract, which expires Aug. 1. The university has asked L.A.’s three other big pubradio stations — KCRW, KUSC and KPCC — plus Stevie Wonder’s Taxi Productions and the incumbent Pacific Public Radio to submit proposals to run KKJZ. Sean Heitkemper, KKJZ’s acting g.m., says the university’s RFP calls for adding “information” to the jazz/blues format and for the university to receive a share of revenues. Frank Sinatra Jr. told the Los Angeles Times that KKJZ is “the last lighthouse in the fog” for straight-ahead jazz on the radio.

Michael Coleman, g.m. at WDET in Detroit, pled no contest to a reduced embezzlement charge Thursday and “faces up to 93 days in jail and $500 fine when he is sentenced June 22,” according to the Ann Arbor News. The charge stemmed from Coleman’s tenure as deputy director of Michigan Public Media, during which he and two colleagues kept Persian rugs, event tickets, a pool table and other donated goods and services for themselves, according to an internal audit by the University of Michigan, the station’s license holder. Coleman has agreed to pay $3500 in restitution to his former employer.

Pabst Blue Ribbon, the former bottom-shelf beer that has become a hipster beverage of choice in recent years, is now underwriting NPR’s All Songs Considered, reports the Boston Herald.

The Senate unanimously approved a bill Thursday that would increase FCC radio and television indecency fines tenfold, from $32,500 to $325,000 per offense, reports Multichannel News. A House version would raise naughty word fines to $500,000. Congress has threatened to dramatically raise indecency penalties since Janet Jackson’s breast sparked a furor about broadcast decency standards in 2004, but the two houses still need to reconcile differences between the bills and pass a final measure before new levels can go into effect.

Text of Bill Moyers’ speech May 18, 2006, at the PBS Showcase Conference, Orlando, Fla. He spoke after PBS gave him its third annual Be More Award. Jump to sections where Moyers: thanks associates for their part in his work, tells why the best is yet to come, recalls discussions in the Johnson White House, lists what public TV could do for democracy , and explains why CPB didn’t get stable funding See also Current‘s coverage and full text of the speech. Thank you for this moment. I consider your award the singular honor of my long life in public broadcasting.

Congress doesn’t work that way, said Wilbur Mills, the formidable chair of the House Ways and Means Committee in the late 1960s. Bill Moyers, then a young aide to President Johnson, recalled the upshot of the Public Broadcasting Act: Congress created CPB but left it without a dedicated revenue source, destined to lobby unceasingly for annual appropriations. This account is excerpted from Moyers’ speech to the PBS Showcase Conference in May 2006. (The full text of the speech is also on this site.) … When he signed it, the President said that the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 “announces to the world that our nation wants more than just material wealth; our nation wants more than ‘a chicken in every pot.’

A Sacramento Bee media columnist stares in the face of extreme boredom without flinching: he listens to almost all of Capital Public Radio’s pledge drive and writes about the experience. “Oh, it’s all there: intriguing suspense, riotous humor, wrenching pathos and pure spoken-word poetry,” he says. “It’s a wonder that the Peabody Award judges have yet to recognize the genius of the KXJZ (88.9 FM) pledge drive.”

Wired summarizes last weekend’s Beyond Broadcast conference. “I think we’re at a very strange point of all these enormously powerful, old, rich institutions — the great brand names of the business — dying in front of our eyes. And they won’t pick up the clue phone,” says Christopher Lydon, host of public radio’s Open Source.

NPR Ombdusman Jeffrey Dvorkin examines a recent blog-induced foofaraw regarding Mara Liasson and Fox News and concludes: “These blogs appear to be making our public life even more crude and vulgar than it has been up to now.” (UPDATE: Media Matters, one of Dvorkin’s culprits, responds.)

Chicago’s Center for Arts Policy presents a lengthy profile of pubradio indie Jay Allison and his myriad projects (PDF). “He is not a man of moderation but living a life at full tilt, waving the flag from his post where the individual gives way to something beyond himself,” writes Lauren Cowen.

Broadcasting & Cable breaks down the ongoing development of PBS’s Next Generation Interconnection System, scheduled to go online this fall. (subscription req.)

Todd Mundt and Mark Fuerst aim to answer the question: “Why do we need aggregation and consolidated technologies?” (Stephen Hill comments here.)

John Barth, managing director of the Public Radio Exchange, shares his thoughts and concerns about the public radio’s recent New Realities National Forum. One idea: “[W]hy shouldn’t NPR, PRI, APM and PRX all merge? . . . We do all waste a lot of money, resources, time and talent on competition with not much distinction.”