The creators of the Public Radio Exchange are discussing their monster over at Transom.org.

Jeffrey Dvorkin’s column on the dustup between Bill O’Reilly and Terry Gross reveals that even NPR admits its own liberal bias, charges conservative columnist Brent Bozell on TownHall.com.

In a letter to the station’s listeners, WAMU Executive Director Susan Clampitt defends the station’s spending despite mounting deficits and criticism of her leadership both within and outside of the station. The letter is posted to the WAMU website.

Bill O’Reilly and Terry Gross continue to hash over their confrontation, this time in the Buffalo News. “How thin-skinned can this guy be?” Gross asks of her sparring partner. (Via Romenesko.)

“Do you want to say a few words about my growing lust?” asks Terry Gross of Sean Penn in “The NPR Blooper Reel,” over at The Morning News.

“I don’t trust the woman, I feel that she’s got an agenda,” says Fox News host Bill O’Reilly of NPR’s Terry Gross in the Philadelphia Daily News. “Her sensibilities lie in the area that I’m evil and what I’m doing is bad.”

After a decade of failed efforts to reverse the tide and rescue the system, PBS is in crisis mode, reports Television Week.

Last week a miniature mobile recording studio came to rest in Vanderbilt Hall of New York’s Grand Central Terminal, marking the debut of StoryCorps, an ambitious undertaking led by independent public radio producer David Isay. StoryCorps aims to popularize the recording of oral histories by making it easy for average Americans to interview one another. Each mini-studio, called a StoryBooth, features tables, chairs, digital recording equipment and a trained facilitator in a quiet, comfortable setting. Booth users are encouraged to bring older relatives and, in 40 minutes of talking, tease out their stories. They walk away with a compact disc of the interview, and another copy goes to a new Library of Congress archive.

“I don’t like the East Coast,” says roving public radio reporter Scott Carrier in The Salt Lake Tribune. “There’s too many people, it’s too flat and there’s too many trees.” A show of Carrier’s photographs has opened in Salt Lake City.

KOCE will remain a public TV station, it appears. Its operator, a community college district in Orange County, Calif., rejected bids from religious broadcasters and accepted one from the KOCE Foundation last night, the Los Angeles Times reported. With strong fundraising, the foundation upped its original $10 million bid to $32 million despite the loss of KCET as a partner.

Coast Community College District, operator of KOCE in Orange County, Calif., will decide whether to sell the public TV station at a board meeting tonight. Two religious broadcasters remain as bidders along with the KOCE Foundation, which would keep the station in the pubTV camp, the Los Angeles Times reported. Via www.MediaInfoCenter.org.

NPR’s Terry Gross was unfair to Bill O’Reilly in her much-discussed interview with the Fox News host, writes NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin. And he says her resorting to an “empty chair” interview approach was “an unethical technique and should not be used on NPR.”

The National Association of Broadcasters is trying to discredit a MITRE study of low-power FM, claiming it is technically flawed and falls short of its congressional mandate. NPR also questions MITRE’s methodology but, breaking from precedent, suggests ways the FCC could begin limited licensing of LPFMs on third-adjacent channels. (Comments are PDFs.) [Earlier coverage in Current.]

A contributor to DIYmedia.net describes a recent confrontation with NPR President Kevin Klose over low-power FM. “It almost seems like if [former FCC Chairman Bill] Kennard would have shown him some personal deference, Klose might have swung the other way on the issue,” s/he writes. Paul at mediageek provides some additional background and links.

“We need public media more than ever,” said Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman at a event in Tucson, Ariz., reports The Tucson Citizen.