During a visit to WXXI, PBS’s Pat Mitchell earns points with the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle editorial page for stepping back from conflict over L’affair Tomlinson. “She smartly was not strident in her reaction” to Tomlinson’s complaints about Now,” the newspaper said.

Rabbit Radio is a Dashboard widget for Apple’s Tiger operating system that “makes listening to your favourite NPR stations easy.”

Steve Salyer, president of Public Radio International, will resign this fall to head the Salzburg Seminar, an Austria-based forum for international issues. He discussed his new job in an interview on Vermont Public Radio.

APTS sent this letter to CPB Board Chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson on June 7, 2005, after media reported that he favors the appointment of former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Patricia Harrison as CPB president. The letter refers to an earlier letter from the Iowa Public Broadcasting Board to the CPB Board. Dear Mr. Tomlinson: The Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) is a nonprofit membership organization established to represent the interests of its members — the nation’s public television stations. APTS works closely with individual station representatives to produce effective national policies and strategies that allow stations to fulfill their individual local missions.

“I am the observer,” says Daniel Schorr in the Washington Post as he reflects on what turned him into a journalist. “Other people do things while I describe them.” (Via Romenesko.)

The new ombudsman at the New York Times, Byron Calame, endorses the newspaper’s decision to appoint a separate newsroom veteran, the “standards editor”, to promote journalistic values and give the ombudsman fewer faults to find.

CPB’s general counsel has taken the FCC job vacated by her new boss. Donna Gregg, CPB’s top lawyer since October 2002, will be the commission’s Media Bureau chief, succeeding Ken Ferree, now acting president at CPB. Like her new boss, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, Gregg is a Duke University grad who worked at the Wiley, Rein & Fielding law firm. Ferree went to Georgetown with Michael Powell, Martin’s predecessor as FCC chairman.

The FCC has granted 17 construction permits for low-power FM stations, reports Radio World.

Media Matters for America and its new blog offspring, Hands Off Public Broadcasting, see inadequate balance in CPB’s pair of ombudsmen. While William Schulz “is clearly a conservative, the other, Ken Bode, is hardly a liberal.”

“I think radio needs a lot more silliness,” says Garrison Keillor in the Boston Globe.

Sound Money is changing its name to Marketplace Money.

NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin and two colleagues joined Diane Rehm today to discuss the CPB ombuds and other aspects of their field. (First hour.)

“We want members who are responsive to readers, not to governments or lobby groups,” said NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin in the New York Times, explaining the decision of the Organization of News Ombudsmen to deny full membership to CPB’s new ombuds.

“PBS does not belong to any single constituency, no one political party, no activist group, no foundation, no funder, no agenda of any kind,” asserted PBS President Pat Mitchell in a National Press Club speech reported by the Los Angeles Times. She declined to mud-wrestle with CPB Chair Ken Tomlinson: “I really don’t feel it’s my place to judge the motivations of someone.”

Right-wing media watchdog L. Brent Bozell tappity-taps on a wedge between public TV and Bill Moyers: “Earth to PBS: When you are under attack for being a nest of left-wingers, it might not be the best strategy to let your most identifiable left-wing stars go to radical-left conferences and attack conservatives as evil.” From a webzine, National Ledger.