The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based civil liberties group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request [PDF] with the Department of Homeland Security seeking documents related to the E-Verify underwriting credits airing on NPR. The group also is pressing NPR to take the spots off the air. “The ad running on NPR is part of a political campaign to make E-Verify mandatory for all U.S. employers,” wrote EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg in a letter [PDF] to NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard. “Perhaps NPR could also look more closely at how the government tries to influence public opinion through expanded media presence and paid sponsorship.”

Filling the vacancy left by the departure of Patty Wente, KWMU-FM in St. Louis has hired Tim Eby, g.m. of WOSU-FM in Columbus and former chair of the NPR Board. He starts work in St. Louis on Inauguration Day, the Riverfront Times reported today. Consultant Rob Paterson twitters appreciatively about KWMU and its public TV neighbor.

Reclaim the Media, a Seattle-based nonprofit “dedicated to pursuing a more just society by transforming our media system and expanding the communications rights of ordinary people,” is offering a unique holiday gift for the broadcast fans on your list: A set of Media Heroes Trading Cards. Forget baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Ernie Banks, instead you can collect and swap such luminaries as longtime PBSer Bill Moyers, “Media Matters” host Bob McChesney and Pacifica Radio founder Lew Hill. How about a Children’s Television Workshop card to show off at your next pubcasting confab? A set of 21 cards sells for $10.

As if they march under the banner, “Leave no grandma behind,” commercial and public stations, city by city, have begun a series of “soft shutdowns” of analog transmitters that’s likely to grow in frequency and duration until all viewers are converted and accounted for.

Bill Lichtenstein, executive producer of pubradio’s The Infinite Mind, got a phone call Nov. 20 from a New York Times reporter with troubling information: the program’s host, psychiatrist Fred Goodwin, had been paid more than $1 million by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline since 2000. “My first question was, where did you get that information?’’ Lichtenstein said in an interview with Current. When the reporter said that Goodwin had told him, Lichtenstein was stunned. “When he began to read me the dollar amounts of fees, year by year, I went from stunned to shocked.” The $1 million-plus figure had been uncovered by Iowa Sen.

Chihiro “Cherry” Enoki, who shared a Daytime Emmy nomination this year for her editing work on the pubTV show Design Squad, died in a fall while climbing California’s Mount Shasta Nov. 28 [2008]. She was 33.

Bill Lichtenstein, executive producer of pubradio’s The Infinite Mind, got a phone call Nov. 20 from a New York Times reporter with troubling information: the program’s host, psychiatrist Fred Goodwin, had been paid more than $1 million by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline since 2000. “My first question was, where did you get that information?’’ Lichtenstein said in an interview with Current. When the reporter said that Goodwin had told him, Lichtenstein was stunned. “When he began to read me the dollar amounts of fees, year by year, I went from stunned to shocked.” The $1 million-plus figure had been uncovered by Iowa Sen.

There is no shortage of factors to explain why public TV ratings have kept sliding. For one, the proportion of viewers with access to satellite and cable has increased, bringing a surge in fragmentation. Then there’s Nielsen’s audience estimation system, undergoing its own upheaval while some pubTV stations still lack the encoders that let the ratings company know they’re out there. On top of all this, some station leaders say PBS isn’t doing enough to create programming that grips viewers. Over the last 10 seasons, PBS’s ratings have dropped 37 percent, from 1.9 in 1998-99 to 1.2 in 2007-08. The primetime weekly cume — the percent of all households that tuned into pubTV in a typical week — has dropped 35 percent to 19.9 in 2007-08.

Chicago Public Radio laid off 11 full-time employees today — 9 percent of its workforce, according to the station. “Although we continue to see positive growth in our overall audience and high responsiveness to our fundraising campaigns, we have experienced revenue shortfalls due to a significant drop in our average donation and limited growth in corporate underwriting,” the station said in a letter to its board and Community Advisory Council, also shared with Current. The cuts come as the station faces a $1.5 million budget shortfall, according to the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Reader lists some of the laid-off employees, which include two hosts of CPR’s startup web/radio hybrid, Vocalo.org

Brian Lehrer, host of an eponymous weekday talk show on New York’s WNYC, fielded a variety of questions this week from readers of the New York Times’s website. “Frankly, I don’t consider my program a radio show anymore,” he wrote in response to a question about podcasting and the future of radio. “I think of it as a radio-based multiplatform interactive news and issue … media thing. If we come up with a short, cogent name for that, I’ll use it. Ideas welcome.” (Via the PRPD blog.)

Public broadcasters should receive proceeds from a tax on campaign ad spending to support their political coverage, argues Wick Rowland, president of Colorado Public Television, in an op-ed in the Rocky Mountain News. “A 3 percent tax on the commercial media expenditures for the 2008 federal elections would have provided roughly $100 million, which could have been invested in a public broadcasting political coverage trust fund,” he writes. “With such a resource, public television and radio stations all over the country could greatly expand and improve their debate work.”

PBS Hawaii plans to buy the soon-to-be-vacated headquarters of Honolulu’s NBC affiliate and move into the studios within the next few years, reports the Pacific Business News. The pubcaster now leases space from the University of Hawaii but failed to secure another long-term lease from the school. It may add a building to its new home, which is much smaller than its current space. “It’s a wonderful ‘control your own destiny’ moment,” said PBS Hawaii President Leslie Wilcox.

CPB has released its FY 2009 Business Plan, which details use of discretionary funds. Up for evaluation is the Challenge Fund, a joint effort with PBS to fund programs that draw a larger audience. “We will investigate alternative methods for attracting and developing these projects,” according to the plan. The 10-part PBS series Carrier, which won widespread critical acclaim, was a Challenge Fund project. CPB also will select one or more of the seven project prototypes in the American History & Civics Initiative for full production funding. The American Archive project moves ahead with grants to stations and content producers to digitize and preserve local content.

PBS President Paula Kerger says the network is “thinking very carefully about what role we will play in news coverage moving forward,” adding that PBS continues to look at “different ways we can partner” with NPR. She spoke to blogger Leonard Witt, a media prof at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University after her speech at an Atlanta Press Club luncheon Dec. 3. One hurdle to PBS’ newsgathering capabilities: funding. The radio network has “made a huge commitment to newsgathering. And in part they’ve been able to do that because they were the beneficiaries of a substantial bequest from Joan Kroc,” a $200 million infusion that NPR received in November 2003.

Kermit H. Boston, a longtime lay leader in public TV, died Nov. 23, the San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday. Boston, 73, suffered a heart attack after returning home from Grace Cathedral, where he chaired the board. The onetime Pennsylvania school teacher and principal had guided many nonprofits as well as individuals in a long life of mentoring, educational publishing and leadership in the African-American communities of several cities. He served on the boards of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia and as board chairman of Manhattan’s Riverside Church before moving west. In San Francisco, he served on the KQED Board from 1997 to 2002, and it elected him chair for the last two years.