“Any budget-cutter or culture warrior hoping to rig an argument that federally funded television exists to serve the coastal elite need only have told her audience get a load of Vine Talk, debuting this month on PBS,” writes Troy Patterson in Slate today (April 6). On the show, host Stanley Tucci and other celebs (such as writer Nora Ephron and actors John Lithgow and Julianne Moore) sample various wines, as a sommelier answers their questions and provides advice to them and the studio audience. Don’t miss the comments below the review, such as: “I think this article makes a great point — PBS’s programming is generally geared towards the intellectual, more refined, probably wealthier crowd.

NPR’s former President Vivian Schiller told an audience at the Paley Center For Media that she was forced to resign even before its board had watched the entire undercover sting video that prompted her departure on March 9. She was interviewed on Tuesday (April 5) by Pat Mitchell, former head of PBS. “The timing was, the edited video hit at about ten o’clock,” Schiller said. “They released the two-hour version, I think it was about two o’clock in the afternoon. We rushed to get a rush transcript. But even a rush transcript — it was two hours, it takes two hours, at a minimum.

Reverberations from the impending sale of primary PBS affiliate WMFE in Orlando, Fla., continue. Secondary stations WDSC at Daytona State College and WBCC in Cocoa, run by Brevard Community College, are taking a wait-and-see approach. WDSC officials said they are “too busy trying to keep their own station going to consider taking on more programming from WMFE,” reports the News-Journal in Daytona Beach. A statement from WBCC-TV said it is “considering all options.” A PBS spokesperson told the paper that the local stations, not PBS, will make the decision as to which will be primary.

“Save NPR! But please, put PBS out of its misery.” That’s quite the provocative headline, and the Slate piece by columnist and author Mark Oppenheimer continues to rack up comments. Oppenheimer said while PBS was a powerhouse early in its existence, “today, it can be difficult to find what ambitious, interesting programming there is on PBS. Earlier this month, I tuned in a few times and was greeted by Antiques Roadshow, a doo-wop concert that I have seen before while channel-surfing, and — several times — the financial advice of Suze Orman. From those glimpses, it seemed that an average evening on PBS had all the intelligence of VH1 and all the youth appeal of CBS.”

Patrick Butler, in his speech at the annual Capitol Hill day sponsored by the Association of Public Television stations this week, had some good news for the station leaders gathered in D.C. to lobby their legislators. “A very senior Republican in the House of Representatives has told me in recent weeks that the [Democratic Rep. Earl] Blumenauer amendment to continue funding public broadcasting would have passed the House — with significant Republican support — if it had been properly offered under the rules of debate on HR 1.” The amendment was killed on a procedural vote just before midnight on Feb.

Five staffers were laid off on April 1 from WMFE-TV in Orlando, Fla., the same day it announced the station was sold to a Christian broadcaster, pending FCC approval. Around eight more positions also will be affected in the coming weeks, Lorri Shaban of TW2 public relations in Orlando told Current. She declined further details. The station also had a two-week staff furlough and wage freeze in October 2010, and laid off 28 percent of its employees in February 2009.

For more than 20 years, public radio has followed a winning formula that is often summarized as “super-serve the core.” That is, a station will be most successful with listeners if it picks a specific type of listener — the core audience — and plans its schedule to attract and hold that type throughout the day and the week.Critics of the core audience strategy object that public radio ends up serving only a well-educated and middle-aged slice of the public — recently a cume audience of 11 percent of the population within a week, which is still a large audience by many measures.At

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service on Monday (April 4) released a report, “Findings from Ready to Learn: 2005-2010,” (PDF) that distills several research and evaluation studies of the early childhood literacy initiative funded by Congress and the U.S. Department of Education in 1992. Among the findings: — PBS shows featuring Ready to Learn concepts motivate children to request trips to bookstores or libraries for books; — preschool-age children who watch Sesame Street spend more time reading for pleasure in high school, and they get better grades in English, math, and science than kids who don’t; — when Ready To Learn video, online, and print materials were combined with teacher training, lesson planning, and classroom instruction, kids from low-income backgrounds were able narrow or close the achievement gap with middle-class kids.

St. Louis Public Radio will break ground for its $10 million new home on April 15. General Manager Tim Eby says the three-story, 27,000-square-foot building is expected to take a year to complete. It’ll be just east of the city’s PBS member station KETC.

The beta version of the Federal Communications Commission’s new website is now live. “This beta launch isn’t a beta in a traditional sense,” writes FCC Managing Director Steven VanRoekel on the Official FCC Blog page. “FCC.gov will change again — and quickly. It’s an approach that’s fairly foreign to the way most agencies work on the Web. But we’ll build this new experience on a solid, future-ready platform; we’re taking a page from the online entreprenuer’s playbook, releasing products quickly and often, and letting the many eyes of the Web drive the continuous improvement we hope FCC.gov will come to embody.”

America’s Public Television Stations presented a Champion of Public Broadcasting Award to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), a key ally in the battle to preserve federal funding for public broadcasting. Sen. Reid has been an advocate for increasing CPB aid and for preserving Ready to Learn, the federal program that provides funding for some PBS Kid shows. This year, Sen. Reid been an outspoken opponent of House Republicans’ efforts to defund CPB and NPR. After the House approved H.R. 1076 last month, Sen. Reid declared that the bill was “unlikely” to gain any traction among Senate lawmakers. “Harry Reid steps in the ring every year on our behalf to ‘float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee,'” said Tom Axtell, g.m.

PBS NewsHour newsman Jim Lehrer is this year’s recipient of the Fourth Estate Award, the highest honor from the National Press Club. “Jim Lehrer has embodied the time-tested core values of journalism dating back to when many people had only black and white screens and continuing through today’s era of high definition television and social media,” National Press Club President Mark Hamrick said in a statement. “Amid the cacophony of a sometimes shrill media landscape, he has remained the true voice of reason, balance and fairness.” Lehrer is the 39th recipient. Previous award winners include Walter Cronkite, Christiane Amanpour and David Broder.

An April 2 fire at KUAR-FM in Little Rock, Ark., is being investigated as possible arson by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. When the station suddenly went off the air around 5:30 p.m. Saturday, the station’s engineer went to the transmitter site on Shinall Mountain to determine the problem. Smoke was pouring from the building but the lock on the front door had been changed so he couldn’t enter. KUAR is currently using a standby transmitter to broadcast at a lower power, and General Manager Ben Fry estimates damages at between $100,000 and $200,000.

The Center for Public Integrity is launching the iWatch News site dedicated to nonprofit investigative journalism, the New York Times is reporting today (April 4). It’ll be updated daily with 10 to 12 original investigative pieces and aggregated content from other sources on money and politics, government accountability, health care, the environment and national security.

OK, so CNN discovered that some Americans think that public broadcasting accounts for 5 percent of the federal budget, or $178 billion (yes, with a “b”) annually. Whew. That got Salon columnlist Alex Pareene thinking about what NPR and PBS could do with that kind of money — like Thai silk tote bags filled with precious stones as pledge premiums.