Garrison Keillor breathes fire in In These Times. “Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous,” he writes in an excerpt from his latest book, Homegrown Democrat.

NPR’s coverage of the lead-up to the Iraq war was mostly balanced, but Morning Edition interviews were soft and the domestic angle was neglected, says NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin in his Media Matters column.

The anti-Kerry Swift Boat smear was “dishonest in the extreme,” writes journalism observer Jay Rosen, but the mainstream press is stunned to find that investigative stories on the campaign failed to “knock down” the accusations and stop replication of the “media virus” that may decide the presidential election.

With mainstream media folks tut-tutting about Fox and bloggers bringing viewpoint into news reporting, Poynter Institute’s Geneva Overholser, herself a mainstream journalist and former ombudsman, points out: “Traditional media have a viewpoint. It’s a good old conventional, “acceptable,” middle-of-the-road viewpoint. It’s the viewpoint, generally speaking, of the powerful — which is by and large, even today, the view of well-to-do male white folks.”

A would-be broadcaster in Indiana is exploiting a little-used FCC rule in an effort to share airtime with unwilling educational stations, reports the (Johnson County) Daily Journal.

CPB has brought back Peggy O’Brien as senior v.p., educational programming and services. In 1994-2000, she headed CPB’s earliest Ready to Learn efforts and served as v.p. of education. Cheryl Williams, now v.p., will report to her. She comes from Cable in the Classroom, where she was executive director.

Members of Azerbaijan’s parliament and its national TV and radio council left last week to study public TV in the United States, Baku Today reported. The tour, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, will stop in D.C., Ohio, Texas and New York.

The New York Times reports on the tensions stations feel about competing against NPR for major donors, and against satellite radio for listeners.

Clear Channel is distributing programming from liberal network Air America in five cities, reports the New York Times. Though public radio could lose listeners to the format, San Diego public station KPBS-FM has sold underwriting to Clear Channel as it advertises the change. Also in the Times, more coverage of KGNU-FM’s purchase of a station in Denver.

In the Boston Globe‘s take on PBS’s Friday-night pundit zone, hard-core lefties and righties alike accuse pubTV of kissing up to Congress. PBS still speaks only of “diversity.”

Forbes lists the salaries of some highly paid public TV execs. (Last item.)

CorpWatch.org reports the commercial TV networks have reduced convention coverage to about 18 hours this year, about 10 percent of its total in 1972, while the TV industry has increased its take of political ads by 40-fold during the same period to about $1 billion.

The Anchorage Press profiles community radio pioneer Jeremy Lansman.

Retired PBS newsman Robert MacNeil discusses the sanguinary political landscape in today’s San Franciso Chronicle, claiming, “Democrats want to see more blood flow from the arrows of journalists and Republicans want more red meat out there going after Democrats.” MacNeil also derides the Fox News Channel and wonders if journalism is returning to its partisan roots. (via mediabistro.com)

Beat reporters can be “secret weapons” for online news sites when they prepare FAQs, primers and other nondeadline pieces that web users would love, writes Dan Froomkin in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. He’s talking about newspaper reporters, but the same could be said about people on the beat for pubradio.