“The object is to expose reality,” says conservative muckraker James O’Keefe, in a New York Times Magazine feature profiling the 27-year-old firebrand as a guerrilla media maker for the right. O’Keefe doesn’t choose targets of his video stings with a particular outcome in mind, he says, but to expose where liberal values have run amok. “Let the people change things,” he says. “Remember, Congress and the president defunded Acorn, not me.” The scandal sparked by O’Keefe’s sting of NPR’s top fundraising exec Ron Schiller doesn’t get a lot of discussion here, but the risks that he takes and the sense of injustice that motivates him does.

PBS is launching a digital channel in Great Britain, the New York Times is reporting. The channel, which will run on satellite and cable, will feature “older and current PBS programs for which it is able to secure the rights,” the newspaper said. A PBS spokesperson had confirmed the deal to the British media news website Broadcast in April. Also that month the UK search firm Robert Lindsay Associates reported placing Richard Kingsbury, the former head of two channels owned by Britain’s UKTV, as g.m. of the new channel, PBS UK. PBSd, a joint venture of PBS and WGBH that sells PBS programs to home video, foreign and commercial markets, is heading up the work.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — After seven years, Masterpiece has a new national corporate sponsor. The 40-year-old anthology drama series on Sunday (July 31) announced the support of Viking River Cruises, a luxury cruise company with international itineraries. “It’s a marriage made in heaven,” Rebecca Eaton, e.p. of the WGBH series, told reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour. The arrangement begins later this year; Eaton declined to provide the specific dollar amount. The investment firm Franklin Templeton, longtime supporter of Nightly Business Report, also is underwriting Masterpiece from May through September. Eaton also told TV critics that the Masterpiece Trust, established in January with a goal of $1 million, is at “$850,000 and counting.”

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Jane Lynch, the villainous cheerleader coach on Fox’s Glee, will have a guest-star as an animated supervillain on a movie-length episode of WordGirl, PBS’s vocabulary-building kids series. Lesli Rotenberg, PBS s.v.p., children’s media and brand management (above), announced Sunday (July 31) that Lynch will supply the voice of a character who uses mean words as secret weapons in an episode to air next year, aimed at helping kids deal with verbal bullying. Other PBS Kids news during the annual summer Television Critics Association press tour: Sesame Street, entering its 42nd season this fall, will include parodies of the Iron Chef cooking show and Glee.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — TV’s Dr. Gregory House will reveal a little-known specialty this fall: a talent for singing and playing jazz piano. Hugh Laurie (right), famous for playing the cranky doctor on the hit Fox show House, told journalists Saturday (July 30) at the Television Critics Association summer press tour that he doesn’t consider himself the equal of the best jazz musicians in New Orleans, but he wasn’t about to pass up the chance to tape an episode and cut an accompanying CD for Great Performances. The show, “Hugh Laurie: Let Them Talk — A Celebration of New Orleans Blues,” is scheduled for Sept.

The interim general manager of Daytona State College’s WDSC-TV, which recently dropped PBS membership, is resigning in September. “I believe the television station is a critical component of Daytona State College and its future,” said Bob Williams in a statement, “and I believe it is important for the college to find the best person possible to lead WDSC in this new and important role.” WDSC’s Director of Educational Services Andrew Chalanick will oversee daily station operations until a permanent general manager is hired.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — More than two months after raising the prospect of primetime promotional breaks within programs, PBS is still studying the idea. PBS President Paula Kerger said Saturday (July 30) at the annual Television Critics Association press tour that viewer testing is ongoing at a Nielsen research facility in Las Vegas. Information from that research will be considered along with feedback from public stations, she said. Proponents of the idea say the promotional breaks will give viewers more information about upcoming programs and allow the audience to from one program to the next, all without reducing the actual amount of program content.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler has written an interesting column on PBS arts coverage. Namely, why PBS, with its rejuvenated focus on the arts, hasn’t run any programming about “one of the biggest stories in the art world,” the ongoing controversy over the famous Barnes collection of paintings moving from its original Philadelphia home to a modern facility away from the city’s museum district. “Is the broader PBS silence in any way reflective of the fact that two powerful, institutional forces in Philadelphia — the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Annenberg Foundation, who were important advocates, fundraisers and financial backers supporting the move of the collection to Philadelphia — are also important financial contributors to various PBS offerings?”

The Seattle PostGlobe, which launched in 2009 as an early online nonprofit newspaper venture with help from public broadcasting station KCTS 9 in Seattle, is closing, it announced today (July 29). “Donations have fallen off. Ads have generated no meaningful revenue — ever,” writes Sally Deneen, co-founder and curator. “We began with no startup money. We obtained no grants. All of which actually provided unusual freedom. But as a volunteer-run site, we’ve run out of helping hands as unemployed journalists have left for jobs. (Which is a good thing!) So this is our final month.” The news site was created after the March 2009 closing of the city’s nearly 150-year-old Post-Intelligencer newspaper.

Among the student-operated college stations to be converted into mainstream public radio FMs this year, the hand-over of Bryant University’s WJMF to WGBH’s 90.5 All Classical differs in one major way: the complete absence of an organized protest by students, alumni and other station supporters, according to Radio Survivor. After looking into the deal, reporter Jennifer Watts discovers one reason why the management agreement sparked so few protests: with a 225-watt signal, WJMF’s student-programmed broadcast service was oriented to the Bryant campus, and the station never developed a strong following in the larger community of Smithfield, R.I. “An indication of this is the fact that WJMF is currently on ‘auto pilot’ over the summer while students are on break,” she writes.

WNED is paying the University of Buffalo $4 million to operate WBFO-FM 88.7 and two other New York stations, the parties announced today (July 28). Talks have been ongoing for more than a year (Current, March 1, 2010). The stations, which also include WUBJ-FM 88.1 in Jamestown and WOLN-FM 91.3 in Olean, will retain their call letters and frequencies. Their signals reach large portions of western New York and southern Ontario, serving approximately 90,000 listeners weekly. The university will use the proceeds of the sale to provide student scholarships and support for faculty research, it said.

In the first of an ongoing series of discussions on the future public broadcasting, the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy (CCLP) convened executives, journalists, policymakers and others in Washington, D.C., this week, to focus on funding threats to the system. The wide-ranging conversation at the gathering, presented with participation of Current, touched on topics ranging from new ideas for centralized fundraising, to financial stress on local news coverage, to diversifying audiences. CCLP will organize future meetings “on public broadcasting, its mission, and its financial and public support,” it said. More than 35 participants included Pat Butler, c.e.o.

Station leaders of the new Essential Public Media believe they can top the former WDUQ’s best audience numbers — in fact, by quite a bit, they told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “We think the potential is there, if not to double the listenership, then to go over 200,000 to 225,000 listeners per week,” Lee Ferraro, general manager of new owner WYEP, said on Wednesday (July 27) during a meeting with newspaper reporters and editors. “It’s not going to happen overnight. We hope to be there by fall.” WDUQ averaged about 145,000 listeners per week over the past  months; its record was 180,000 listeners per week in 2009.

NPR’s Tweeter extraordinaire Andy Carvin has won a Knight-Batten Award for having “pioneered a new form of journalism” during the recent Arab Spring uprising. “By using his Twitter account as a newsgathering operation, he has demonstrated how reporting can be done remotely and created a highly engaged community of more than 50,000 Twitter followers,” said a release from J-Lab, which administers the honors funded by the Knight Foundation. (J-Lab and Current are both journalism centers at American University’s School of Communication.) The Knight-Batten Awards recognize creative uses of technology to engage citizens in public issues and showcase compelling models for future newsgathering.

A proposed auction of television spectrum has now become tangled up in the onerous ongoing debate over raising the debt ceiling, Broadcasting & Cable reports. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took to the Senate floor Wednesday (July 27) to criticize the debt-ceiling plan of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) for including payments to broadcasters as part of incentive auctions that could run into billions of dollars. “Television broadcasters got the spectrum for free,” he said. “Now we’re supposed to ask the taxpayers to give them a billion dollars to give back spectrum that they owe?” Although he corrected that word to own, “his original seemed to better capture the tenor of his criticisms,” B&C notes.