Lefty media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting criticized a recent NewsHour panel discussion of the war in Iraq, saying it included no strong advocates for troop withdrawal. FAIR urged its readers to e-mail NewsHour producers and “encourage the program to broaden future discussions to include such voices.” PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler said he’s received more than 100 e-mails about the matter.

The violence depicted in broadcast networks’ primetime programs is approaching “epidemic proportions,” according to a study issued yesterday by the Parents Television Council. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who appeared at the news conference unveiling the study, warned broadcasters to do a better job of policing themselves, lest Congress decides to take action, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Live from Las Vegas! PubTV programmers Keith York and Garry Denny are blogging about their adventures at the International Consumer Electronics Show. The blog, a new service of Public Television Programmers’ Association, aims to help station programmers learn what’s happening at major conferences dealing with media technologies and programming.

A traditional newspaper is far more stylish than a laptop, Garrison Keillor writes in this Salon piece. “A man at a laptop is a man at a desk, a stiff, a drone,” he says. “A newspaper reader, by comparison, is a swordsman, a wrangler, a private eye.” Here he outlines rules for reading papers with the proper amount of savoir faire.

KCET has received its biggest-ever underwriting grant: $15 million to go national with its twin Peabody-winning parenting/caregiving programs A Place of Our Own and Los Niños en Su Casa. The donors: BP America and the BP Foundation. BP previously donated $10 million to launch the series in California. CPB will give $3.8 million for the national launch and the First 5 California Commission will contribute $6 million. Earlier Current feature on the programs.

APTS will be part of a coalition of broadcasting, retail and social interest groups, led by the National Association of Broadcasters, that is mounting a two-year campaign to educate consumers about the 2009 analog TV shut-off, The Hill reports.

Open Media Network, the online non-commercial content portal featuring lots of pubcaster programs, is optimizing its video for larger screens, it announced at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. OMN content is viewable at qualities suitable for TV screens via broadband-equipped sets such as HP’s MediaSmart LCD TV, or TiVo DVRs.

Kenneth Tomlinson, ousted former chair of the CPB Board, asked President Bush not to renominate him to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the federal agency that oversees Voice of America and other international media efforts, the Washington Post reports. Last fall a State Department probe found Tomlinson worked on his horse-racing business from his government office and improperly hired a friend, among other missteps. Despite the allegations, President Bush renominated him to the board in November but few expected the new Democratic majority in Congress to confirm him. Tomlinson, who will serve on the BBG until a replacement is named, is going to write a book about his experiences.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler proposes a new year’s resolution for public TV journalists and producers of news and public affairs programs: ratchet up your “determination to challenge, to explore and to cut through spin” in coverage of the Bush administration’s new strategy for Iraq.

NPR announced today that it’s developing a new show — target audience, ages 25-44 — that will compete with its own Morning Edition. The program, based at NPR’s New York bureau, will air on stations (some through digital multicasts), station websites and Sirius Satellite Radio. Matt Martinez, a Weekend Edition producer, will head development, NPR spokeswoman Andi Sporkin told Current. Producers will pilot the show and seek feedback starting in September. (They will use a new piloting process called Rough Cuts, which NPR is now using to develop its second African-American news program, hosted by Michel Martin.)

After an exhaustive critique of complaints about historical inaccuracies in the 2003 PBS documentary Einstein’s Wife, PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler recommended that PBS “pull the plug” on the show’s companion website and suspend DVD sales of the documentary, pending a scholarly review of the content. Rather than remove the website, PBS posted an editor’s note [scroll down] informing visitors that web producers and outside scholars are reviewing the online content. DVDs are still for sale on Shop PBS.

PBS hired the founding executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, Jason Seiken as senior v.p., interactive, the network announced today. He has been an AOL content executive at headquarters and in London. Cindy Johanson, who had led PBS’s online efforts for more than a decade, left the network after a reorganization in June.

MarketWatch‘s Jon Friedman profiles Katty Kay, a co-anchor on BBC World News and Washington correspondent for the British network. “Yes, BBC World reaches 281 million households worldwide,” Friedman writes. “But, like soccer, the BBC remains second-string, and probably always will be, to the tradition-bound American audience.”

With a recess appointment of Warren Bell to the CPB Board, President Bush circumvented Senate opposition to the controversial nominee, reports the Los Angeles Times. (CPB press release.)

The New York Times reports on the return of Postcards from Buster, the PBS children’s series that was “attacked by the secretary of education, pilloried by conservatives, then abandoned by its underwriters” after a 2005 episode portraying the lives of real kids with lesbian parents.