Calling CPB Board Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson’s efforts to bring more conservatives into public broadcasting “extremely troubling,” two House Democrats asked CPB’s Inspector General to investigate hiring and contracting practices at the corporation, reports the Los Angeles Times. [Text of letter in PDF.]

“I don’t want to achieve balance by taking programs that are the favorites of good liberals off the air,” said CPB chairman Ken Tomlinson on the latest On the Media. “I want to make sure that when you have programs that tilt left, we also have some programs that tilt right so the viewer can make up his or her own mind.”

The Sundance Documentary Fund, One World US, Line TV and New California Media are grantees in the Ford Foundation’s $50 million public-media initiative, along with pubcasting groups such as PRX, PRI, Public Radio Capital, the minority consortia and ITVS, the foundation disclosed today.

Salon’s Eric Boehlert sizes up CPB’s push for balance and Ken Tomlinson pens an op-ed for the Washington Times.

Aaron Barnhart of TV Barn outlines why the ruckus over public broadcasting is overblown.

The Ford Foundation is spending $50 million over five years on public media grants, including $10M to PBS and $7.5M to NPR, the New York Times reported. The PBS grant will back new programming ideas and help start the PBS Foundation. It was not clear whether the $50M sum includes $2 million to ITVS for international viewpoints, $1.8M given this year to Link TV, $1M to American University’s Center for Social Media, $600,000 to Consumers Union for media policy work or $300,000 to Prometheus Radio Project for work in grassroots radio. The foundation spent millions to start public TV stations and develop national programming for them in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the June edition of pubTV’s In the Life, the lesbian moms who were game enough to pretend to be talking to a cartoon rabbit instead of a video camera comment on their run-in with Postcards from Buster.

We’ve posted the text of the resolution concerning CPB that NPR members approved in a straw poll last week at their annual membership meeting.

On the Media responds to the Wall Street Journal‘s critique of the show with a brief note and links to reports referenced in the op-ed.

Blogger Andy Carvin points out that Open Source, Christopher Lydon’s new talk show, will incorporate the new idea of “mobcasting” into a companion website.

A large article in The Nation assesses NPR and finds it guilty of excessively safe and stodgy journalism. Garrison Keillor discusses his wide-ranging tastes in radio programs: “Once, on the Merritt Parkway heading for New York, I came upon The American Atheist Hour, the sheer tedium of which was wildly entertaining — there’s nobody so humorless as a devout atheist.”

In the Wall Street Journal, Jacob Laksin of the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture argues that NPR’s On the Media is “in thrall to left-wing politics.”

If Newt Gingrich had succeeded in privatizing public broadcasting, PBS wouldn’t be in the situation it’s in today, writes Jonathan Chait in today’s Los Angeles Times. “The only reason PBS has to have GOP partisans scrubbing it of any faint signs of residual liberalism is that it has to answer to the federal government.”

Attorney and former FCC chairman Reed Hundt , a co-chair of the PBS-appointed Digital Future Initiative, previewed his thinking in a Current commentary seven months before the panel issued its recommendations at the end of 2005. See also Co-chair James Barksdale’s commentary. Jim Barksdale said at the very first meeting of the Digital Future Initiative that one thing that he learned in his different business successes is that the main thing is to make the main thing always be the main thing. I’m going to try to do that today by telling you the main thing on my mind after working for months with our distinguished panel and bringing in lots of other people to talk to us.

The New York Times editorial board weighs in on politicization of public broadcasting.