An analyst tells Forbes that the market for digital radio will start to pick up next year or in 2006.

The war in Iraq–especially the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal–have eclipsed Bono and Janet Jackson, the New York Times reports. This article says indecency legislation crafted this spring is increasingly unlikely to reach President Bush’s desk before the November election. The story claims politicians “who push too hard on the decency issue may risk appearing to have their priorities out of whack.” Also: Broadcasting & Cable reports that an upcoming episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit will “explore the rights of those who express their views over public airwaves.” The show will hinge on the alleged offenses of a Howard Stern stand-in.

Thoughts of Appalachia may stir up visions of either hillbilly backwoods or quaint Edens, but both miss the complicated truth illuminated by three documentaries coming to public TV. The docs diverge in their depictions of the mountain region

Rising program costs have prompted WRVO-FM in Oswego, N.Y., to drop some PRI shows and consider axing The Splendid Table, reports the Syracuse Post-Standard. MPR will soon distribute its own shows, which costs stations that air its programming an additional affiliation fee.

Dick Gordon, host of public radio’s The Connection, lives across the street from boss Jane Christo in a home full of “extraordinary international furnishings and artifacts,” according to a Boston Globe feature.

Common Cause picked up on today’s New Yorker article (see below), charging that CPB is now acting as “the agent of ideological interference” instead of playing its original heat-shield role. CPB is backing two new programs hosted by conservatives at the same time PBS is halving the length of Bill Moyers’ program, the lobbying group said.

A Philadelphia Inquirer columnist vents her frustration with the BBC Newshour, which some public radio stations carry. (Via Romenesko. Reg. req. Bugmenot.com is a useful tool for dealing with website registrations, by the way.)

The right wing has stopped trying to kill PBS and is now seeking a larger voice in shaping it, writes media chronicler Ken Auletta in today’s New Yorker. “Big Bird Flies Right: How Republicans learned to love PBS” [text not online] reports that PBS plans to add CPB-backed programs hosted by Paul Gigot of Wall Street Journal and conservative critic Michael Medved (co-hosting with a liberal). Auletta says PBS President Pat Mitchell was thwarted from signing Newt Gingrich to host a Friday-night show because Fox News had him under contract. But PBS didn’t pursue the idea of a program for middle-schoolers to be hosted by the vice president’s wife, Lynne Cheney, proposed by producer Michael Pack before he joined CPB.

First Broadcasting, a commercial radio group, is petitioning the FCC to change its procedures for licensing stations. Some of the changes, if adopted, would affect public radio, including how the agency handles vacant allotments and community-of-license switches.

PBS President Pat Mitchell is one of three candidates for chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America named in a New York Times report. MPAA has found it hard to find a successor for Jack Valenti.

Lori Robertson of American Journalism Review chews over threats to depth and innovation at NPR News as the network adds hours of news programming for reporters to fill. When asked to file for three shows in a day, Nina Totenberg recalls replying: “If you want me to know anything for me to report, you have to leave me alone for a few hours to do it.”

After a year of operating a transmitter in Sacramento, San Francisco’s KQED has a weekly cume of just 19,000, while the local pubradio station, KXJZ, has 140,000 — up 3,000 from last year, the Sacramento Bee reported. The Bay Area station competes head-on with KXJZ, running Morning Edition, TOTN, ATC and Marketplace at the same times (with one half-hour discrepancy).

Sounds like the Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary is now in beta release, for pubcasters who want to try digital asset management. [Text of the dictionary’s present version. Earlier Current article.] Panelists from all corners of pubcasting looked at the alpha version in February during a comment period. Now the CPB-funded dictionary of metadata terms is being tested. Version 1.0 is due out in the fall.

Does NPR have a liberal bias? Hardly, according to lefty media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. In its study of NPR signature programming, FAIR found the network’s partisan sources are more likely to be Republican. The study titled “How Public is Public Radio?” also claims NPR “relies on the same elite and influential sources that dominate mainstream commercial news, and falls short of reflecting the diversity of the American public.”

“I intend to become much more of an advocate for public broadcasting than when I am on the air and seem to be acting in self-interest.” In a Texas Monthly interview, Bill Moyers discusses the price public broadcasting pays for federal funding and what he intends to do about it.