Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and ranking member Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) have named the members of their subcommittees, including the Communications and Internet Subcommittee that has the most direct oversight of communications issues and the FCC, reports Broadcasting & Cable today (Feb. 25). John Kerry (D-Mass.) returns as subcommitte chair; GOP ranking member is John Ensign (Nev.). “The Republican membership includes two of the 10 most conservative Senators according to National Journal’s just-released ratings,” B&C points out — such as Jim DeMint (S.C.), author of several bills to defund public broadcasting.

“The conventional tag that I often see applied to PBS is ‘liberal,'” writes PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler in his column today (Feb. 25). “I get a fair amount of mail from critics who say they are viewers and who say they see public broadcasting that way.” But wait: “I also get probably an equal amount from viewers, or from people who claim to be viewers, that think PBS has moved to the right, that the service has increasingly sold out to the right-wing and corporate interests. I’m not trying to invoke, here, the idea that when one is criticized by both sides it must mean it is doing something right and in the broader public’s interest.”

WNYC Radio in New York City has joined American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, which will provide its newsroom with a direct link to persons in their community to act as sources for reporting, reports Fishbowl NY. WNYC will focus on the subject of education, reaching out to both English- and Spanish-speaking mebers of the community. More than 40 newsrooms nationwide are now members of the network (Current, Jan. 24, 2011).

PBS is going live on Gowalla in March. Not sure what that means? “Gowalla helps you keep up with friends, share your favorite places and discover the extraordinary around you,” it says. So where is PBS? Thirteen hours ago, at the White House South Lawn.

If you’re curious about web analytics but weren’t able to participate in the Feb. 9 webinar on the topic from the National Center for Media Engagement, it’s now archived at its site.

The fourth and fifth in a series of white papers aimed at implementing recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy are being released today (Feb. 25) at an Aspen Institute roundtable from 9 a.m. to noon Eastern (webcast here). The papers: “Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government” by Jon Gant and Nicol Turner-Lee, and “Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action” by Adam Thierer. Roundtable participants include John Bracken, Knight’s director of digital media; Lucy Dalglish, e.p. of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; and Lee Rainie, director of Pew’s Internet and American Life Project.

Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), new chairman of the Rules Committee in the House of Representatives, is a big fan of public broadcasting, particularly NPR’s foreign coverage and This American Life, the Public Radio International series produced by WBEZ in Chicago. Yes, you read that correctly. “It might not be healthy these days for conservatives to admit they like public broadcasting, given the relentless flogging it takes from some ideologues,” writes the Los Angeles Times’ Jim Rainey. “So give credit to Dreier for acknowledging the truth — that NPR, PBS and their local affiliates are gems that deserve our support, one way or another.”

The budget stalemate continues to percolate over the Continuing Resolution to keep the government running through September, which contains a provision wiping out all of CPB’s funding. Since the bill’s passage at 4:30 a.m. Feb. 19, the Republicans put together a bill that would push the March 4 deadline two weeks – with $4 billion in cuts, roughly proportional to the $61 billion over the remaining seven months of the fiscal year. Senate Democrats rejected that idea, the Washington Post reports. Those lawmakers, meanwhile, want another 30 days to work all this out with funding remaining at current levels; House Republicans rejected that idea.

Congressional Democrats have to make some tough choices about which programs to defend against the Republican drive to slash government spending, especially when it comes to a “fat GOP target” like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to op-ed page editors of the Boston Globe. CPB’s $531 million appropriation is a comparatively small item in the federal budget, but it offers a big political pay-off for Republicans. As the Globe sees it, public radio doesn’t need federal assistance: NPR receives only a sliver of this federal aid through direct grants, and the financial squeeze of lost CPB grants on public radio stations could be eased through dues relief.

Aloyce Beth DuVal Deare, a pioneering producer of African-American programming and documentaries at WGBH, was killed Feb. 20 in a four-alarm house fire at her home in Newton, Mass. She was 63. She had also been battling brain cancer, which had spread from throat cancer last year. Deare won 13 Emmys and a Peabody Award during her tenure at the station in the 1980s. One was for a critically acclaimed “In the Matter of Levi Heart,” a documentary about a Boston Police shooting. Her credits also include “Beacon to Freedom: Black Life in the Bay Colony,” which she finished in 2008 while undergoing treatment for throat cancer, and American Experience’s “Midnight Ramble,” a 1994 film tracing the history of black filmmaking.

Are you in pubmedia? Here are five Twitter feeds you should be following, as suggested by Bryce Kirchoff at the National Center for Media Engagement.

America is the only major democracy in the West to rely almost entirely on commercial media to comprehensively inform its citizens. So says Rodney Benson, associate professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, in the online magazine Miller-McCune.com. The two surveyed 14 countries; in every Western European democracy they examined, public broadcasting channels attract at least a third of the national TV audience. “Who is the average BBC watcher?” Benson says. “Everybody in Britain.” And foreign public media stations can schedule news programming during primetime.“Whereas there’s a big different in what people know here, when you compare high and low income, high and low education, in some of these countries there’s almost no difference,” Benson says.

America’s first student news network, Hiki No – it means “can do” – premieres Feb. 28 on PBS Hawaii, reports the Star-Advertiser in Honolulu. Students from more than 50 public, charter and private high schools and middle schools in the state will contribute to the first season. Initially there will be one one new half-hour, student-created newscast each week; eventually, the project is shooting for six new Hiki No newscasts weekly. Newscasts also will be available on PBS Hawaii’s website. Funding was provided by CPB and the Clarence T.C. Ching Foundation. Local filmmaker Stuart Yamane also created a half-hour documentary, “Backstory: The Making of Hiki No,” which debuted Feb.

Joyce Campbell, who has worked in public television continuously since 1959, is retiring as KCET’s vice president of education and children’s programming. Her last day is March 18. Campbell has been with the Los Angeles station for 20 years. She’s supervised many of the station’s major initiatives, from bi-lingual pledge programs to California Connected, the science series The Human Quest and A Place of Our Own and Los Niños en Su Casa, for Spanish- and English-speaking child caretakers. Most recently, she  helped develop Sid the Science Kid with the Jim Henson Co. and served as KCET e.p. on the series through the production of its second season, just wrapping.

PBS President Paula Kerger was in Knoxville recently, and chatted with Metro Pulse. One topic: Why PBS remains unique in the world of TV. “There are just so many options, and so many channels have pursued different niches. … Other channels, like the Learning Channel, Bravo, and the History Channel started down the path towards being a commercial version of public broadcasting, but they’ve all moved away from it. … The History Channel’s name franchise is now Ice-Road Truckers, you know? So we’re still providing something no one else is.”