The New York Times drops in on the set of A Prairie Home Companion The Movie. “All of us understand and respond to the fact that this is his [Garrison Keillor’s] baby, he is the creator, and that this is a 30-year project being immortalized on film,” says actress Virginia Madsen. (Coverage in Current.)

Studio 360 host Kurt Andersen shares recipes for fried sage leaves and deep-fried okra with the New York Times Magazine.

A Harvard professor laments the cancellation of WBUR’s The Connection: “While a growing audience is desirable, that should not be the chief criterion for a public broadcast outlet.” And Mark Jurkowitz notes the firing of WBUR reporter Michael Goldfarb.

CPB’s redesigned website includes detailed results from opinion polls that measured public perceptions of bias in pubcasting programs in 2002 and 2003. The survey findings don’t support CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson’s view of liberal bias on PBS and NPR. As researchers wrote in a summary, “[b]oth surveys confirm the same thing: The majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased.”

CPB denied funding to Theory of Everything, reports host Benjamen Walker, who adds that it might be “the beginning of the end for the radio program.”

“Something fishy is going on at PBS,” says Candorville.

Boston’s WBUR will cancel The Connection and move On Point into the vacated morning time slot, reports the Boston Globe. A Globe columnist praises the changes at WBUR and competitor WGBH: “The Montagues at ‘BUR are beefing up their signature local news, while the Capulets at ‘GBH are finally pursuing their mandate as our arts and culture station with some juice.” (More coverage from WBUR.)

The New York Times reviews two recently published histories of public radio: “Although the two books share a lot, they are separated by a substantial accomplishment gap.”

Jim Terr offers a new song, “Hands Off My NPR” (MP3, Windows Media also available). “You can do anything to my blue suede shoes/You can splash mud on my car/But you’re gonna be awful sorry/If you mess with my NPR.” Terr has also written a musical lament about Susan Stamberg’s cranberry relish recipe.

Fitch Ratings affirmed Colorado Public Radio’s bonds as stable but has downgraded Nashville Public Radio’s bonds to negative, citing the station’s negative operating margins and “resulting liquidity drawdowns to cover debt service costs.”

Cheryl Halpern, a major Republican donor on the CPB Board, is likely successor to Ken Tomlinson as chair, the Washington Post reports. His term expires in September. Halpern stirred debate in a 2003 Senate hearing when she objected that the CPB Board lacks the power to do much about its balance mandate. When she and Tomlinson served on the board overseeing VOA, she said, they could remove journalists who editorialized.

The Senate Appropriations Committee today backed the addition of $111M to the $400M CPB advance appropriation for FY08 recently approved by the House, APTS reported. The Senate panel okayed $35M for DTV conversion, $40M for an upgrade of pubTV’s satellite system, $25M for Ready to Learn and $11 million for Ready to Teach.

CPB has released an RFP for public radio music programming. Proposals will compete for $1 million of the $6.4 million available this year for national radio programming.

An upcoming Masterpiece Theater will feature Rupert Everett as Sherlock Holmes, prompting the Washington Post‘s Lisa de Moraes to quip that the network “must now find a Masterpiece Theatre production starring a homophobic actor to preserve that perfect ‘balance’ demanded by Corporation for Public Broadcasting chief Ken Tomlinson.”

“‘[B]alance’ is not the whole story and supporters of public broadcasting should not take it as some sort of gold standard,” writes former CPB employee Elizabeth Spiro Clark on TomPaine.com.