Examine WAMU’s budget and “there are no thousand-dollar designer trash cans lurking in the numbers, no junkets to Caribbean islands, nothing that smacks of illegality or unethical spending,” reports the Washington Post. Instead the numbers reveal how an ambitious strategic plan failed to produce the results station leaders had hoped for.

German public television is defending two of its cultural channels from politicians’ proposal that they be merged to save money, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported. Public TV is seeking to increase the tax on TV sets 6 percent to 17 euros ($21) a month.

Some Vermonters want their state public radio network to carry Democracy Now!, but the network’s president says the show won’t air because of its brand of advocacy journalism, reports the Rutland Herald. Other public radio managers say their listeners have been spearheading similar campaigns.

Virginia and the District of Columbia have begun to compete for the site of PBS headquarters, the Washington Business Journal reported. PBS’s lease in Alexandria, Va., expires in 2006.

The Berkshire Eagle criticizes Bill Moyers for his Nov. 28 interview with Jim Bouton, former major league baseball pitcher and author who battled the newspaper over preservation of an old baseball park in Pittsfield, Mass. During the same broadcast, Moyers delivered an essay tying Bouton’s experience in a one-newspaper town to the dangers of media consolidation [Via thetip.org].

New York’s WNET is looking for a few good donors, reports the Daily News. The station needs cash to digitally restore some of its most valuable programming, including “American Family” (1973) and “The Great American Dream Machine” (1971-72).

The Annenberg Foundation has given $3.5 million to the Metropolitan Opera to help keep the company’s weekly broadcasts on the air, reports the New York Times (reg. req.). ChevronTexaco withdrew its support for the Met earlier this year.

KGNU-FM in Boulder, Colo., is working with Public Radio Capital to help buy an AM signal in Denver.

Former Connection host Christopher Lydon has started a new weblog devoted to the 2004 presidential election.

Maryland Public Television’s contracting and bonus practices came under fire in a report released yesterday by the state’s legislative auditor, reports the Baltimore Sun.

The Baltimore Sun runs down the history behind Joan Kroc’s $200 million gift to NPR.

The Baltimore Sun‘s David Folkenflik reports on a proposal to privatize Maryland Public Television.

Wall Street Week with Fortune, the PBS series that reinvented itself last year after a messy split with original host Louis Rukeyser, is setting itself further apart from its progenitor. The program sharpened its reporting this fall on the scandal-plagued financial markets while expanding its coverage to economic trends beyond Wall Street. Acknowledging the steady drumbeat of news about improper trading practices and corporate malfeasance, Executive Producer Larry Moscow wants WSW to reflect investors’ ire over scams that deflated their portfolios and retirement accounts. Investors, he observed, are now saying, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Interesting tidbit: Fox News’s right-wing talker Sean Hannity got his start in broadcasting at public station KCSB in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes writes in the Columbia Journalism Review that “a sense that [the U.S. press] had abdicated its duty to help the public think beyond instinctive reactions” drove her out of journalism and into advocacy work in Afghanistan.