In Slate magazine, Stephen Metcalf tells how America’s Test Kitchen wins over viewers despite or perhaps because of its “overwhelming wonkishness” of its food talk and the “studied crumminess” of its production values. He suspects the co-hosts are flirting with each other in some nerdy low-key way.

Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star advises viewers how they can catch PBS shows like Independent Lens that local station KCPT chooses not to air.

A Wisconsin company has introduced a board game based on public radio’s Whad’Ya Know?, complete with a Michael Feldman bobblehead, reports The Capital Times.

In his latest “Media Matters” column, NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin addresses the case of an incomplete transcript and suggests NPR should not shy from naming CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Andrea Levin charges in The New York Post that the effect of NPR’s Middle East coverage “is to promote the views of Israel’s detractors.” Levin is executive director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

Sparks fly on WHYY’s Fresh Air as Terry Gross interviews Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor and frequent critic of NPR. Listen to the interview on the show’s website. The denizens of online community blog MetaFilter discuss the dust-up. An episode of The O’Reilly Factor posed the question, “Why did National Public Radio’s Terry Gross ambush O’Reilly?” And a public radio news director calls O’Reilly “hypocritical.” (Last link via Romenesko.)

The Baltimore Sun profiles Ira Glass and also notes the death of his mother.

TV critics review Frontline‘s season opener, “Truth, War and Consequences,” in the New York Times, Washington Post and Salt Lake Tribune.

WTMD (Towson, Md.) and WEMC (Harrisonburg, Va.) were among 28 radio stations fined $3,000 by the FCC today for failing to keep proper public files.

Heavy viewers of the Fox News Channel are nearly four times as likely to hold demonstrably untrue positions about the war in Iraq as are consumers of NPR and PBS, according to a study described in the Baltimore Sun.

Public TV execs and viewers respond to an anti-PBS op-ed that ran in several newspapers: the Salem Statesman Journal, the St. Petersburg Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune (registration required).

The secret operations of a New York City agency obscure the likely sale of city TV and radio stations WNYE, reports the New York Times.

Talking with mediabistro.com, Washington Post magazine critic Peter Carlson reveals a perk of his job is getting the New Yorker delivered to his door. “I thought I was really hot shit until early one Sunday morning he delivered the wrong copy to me, and it was addressed to Noah Adams of NPR,” Carlson says. “I mean, Noah Adams is a fine human being, but we’re not talking about Henry Kissinger here.” (Via Romenesko.)

The Associated Press profiles Transom.org.

Executives at Denver’s two public TV stations “can’t agree whether it’s a blessing or a curse that the city has two PBS channels with different programs and audiences,” reports the Denver Business Journal.