When Congress adopted the Public Broadcasting Act 40 years go, it put its contribution to public TV and radio into the hands of the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting with a structural characteristic and two mandates that have caused conflict and inertia ever since. The law has the President nominate the CPB Board and the Senate confirm the CPB Board. Rather than keeping political appointees off the board, it splits them almost equally. The majority are chosen by the White House from its own party and the minority of board members named, in practice, by Senate leaders of the other party.

“Sid the Science Kid is a great show for teaching science to little kids, but not so great for the adults watching with them,” writes Wired blogger (a.k.a. “geekdad”) Matt Blum about the new PBS Kids show from the Jim Henson Company. Sid, which is geared toward kids 3 to 6, doesn’t have those jokes only parents would get, he says–such as Cookie Monster introducing himself as Alistair Cookie.

Cindy Browne never promised them a rose garden. In fact, the founding executive director of Iowa Public Radio repeatedly promised the network’s 50-some staffers a long passage through anger, grief and confusion, before things would get the least bit rosy. Over the past three years, events delivered some of the expected benefits of combining the public radio operations at Iowa’s three big state universities, as well as the promised discomforts for both listeners and staffers. The next steps are up to a new set of executives. In coming months, IPR will hire, besides an executive director, a content director, a music director, a development director and a Cedar Rapids reporter.

NPR has agreed to let CBS Entertainment make a pilot for a TV show based on Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, according Media Bistro’s Fishbowl DC blog. CBS will finance the pilot and decide whether to commission a TV series, says a Sept. 4 NPR memo published by the blog.

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman writes of her arrest this week at the Republican National Convention: “Behind all the patriotic hyperbole that accompanies the conventions, and the thousands of journalists and media workers who arrive to cover the staged events, there are serious violations of the basic right of freedom of the press.”

KCLU-FM, based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., has bought an AM station in Santa Barbara to improve its reach up the Pacific Coast, the Ventura County Star reported last week. The news station now simulcasts in Santa Barbara on a weaker FM signal. KIST-AM changed hands for $1.4 million. Its owner, Rincon Broadcasting LLC, bought seven stations from Clear Channel Communications last year and was required by the FCC to sell one of the stations. KCLU covered the purchase with funds raised in its $7.5 million capital campaign. Lance Orozco heads KCLU’s prizewinning news effort.

NPR’s Andy Carvin describes the social networking applications powering the Hurricane Information Center, which launched last weekend in anticipation of Gustav’s landfall and broadened in scope as a community-powered forum for information and user-generated content about Hanna and other storms of the 2008 hurricane season. The site is built by some 500 volunteers who have the technology skills to pull together an “amazing array of tools and resources that can be useful to the public in times of crisis,” Carvin tells Poynter Online columnist Al Tompkins. “With this volunteer effort, people are coming out of the woodwork to drop everything and work on hurricane-related mashups, collect information for our wiki, develop text-messaging interfaces, etc.”

“Democracy Now! radio host Amy Goodman and two producers were arrested yesterday while covering demonstrations at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn.,” reports the Washington Post. “Goodman was released after being held for over three hours, but is still waiting to hear when Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar would be released.” A release from Democracy Now! says Goodman was arrested “while attempting to free two…producers who were being unlawfully detained.” According to the release, the producers were arrested “while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention.” Both stories include video of Goodman’s arrest. 

An extensive study by NPR Labs points to significant trade-offs between the audience reach of digital HD Radio and the amount of interference to analog FM. Even though its transmission power is just 1 percent of analog FM’s, its range for listeners in cars comes close to equaling analog,  the CPB-funded study found. But HD reaches areas including little more than one-third as many indoor listeners. To extend its range, the National Association of Broadcasters in January joined other industry groups advocating an optional power boost for HD Radio, permitting stations to emit digital signals at 10 percent of analog transmitters’ power.

New Orleans public TV station WYES’s “ordeal with FEMA is a Frontline episode in itself,” writes Dave Walker, Times-Picayune TV columnist. The station’s building was mostly destroyed by Katrina, and although the broadcast signal was restored in December 2005, most of the staff is working out of leased space in Metairie. WYES is able to use its old studio for pledge and several local programs, with temporary utilities and temporary approval from the city to operate there. FEMA declined to provide the station with recovery money, says g.m. Randy Feldman, because, in FEMA’s eyes, it is not an educational institution or arts organization and doesn’t provide emergency communications services–even though WYES provides a slew of educational and arts programming and is part of the Emergency Broadcast System.

The FCC has reopened the question of whether the merged Sirius-XM satellite radio company should be required to include HD Radio receiver chips in its new tuners. On Monday the commission released a Notice of Inquiry that also asks if satellite radio chips should be added to HD Radio receivers. In a blog posting about the notice, FCC watcher Matthew Lasar also reports on a controversy about channels that Sirius-XM agreed to set-aside for minority broadcasters.

NPR.org launched two new blogs today. With daily posts by entertainment writer Linda Holmes, Monkey See explores the intersection of anthropology and comedy that is pop culture. Podcaster Rob Sachs, director of Tell Me More, expands into the blogosphere with What Would Rob Do? (WWRD), a blog serving three weekly doses of humor-laced practical advice. Sach’s first topic is flatulence, but he’s promising tips on making a great mixtape. What are the odds he’ll recommend audio cassettes over MP3 playlists?

A new DVD set about James Brown features a documentary about the legendary soul singer’s performance in Boston the night after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated — a performance that aired on Boston’s WGBH-TV. Commentators in The Night James Brown Saved Boston credit the station’s broadcast of the show (which pre-empted a Chekhov production) with preventing riots from erupting. The Wall Street Journal reviews the doc.

While Digg and other online news aggregators use popularity to recommend articles, the new site NewsCred asks users to rate the credibility of the article, the journalist, the news org and even the news sources by choosing “credit” or “discredit.” The users’ reactions combine to yield a rating between 1 and 100. Public input has been limited because the site just graduated from alpha to public beta stage on Tuesday, and all of the rated media are scoring north of 99 points (NPR is at 99.12, a point above right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin). But that can’t last. NewsCred kicks off its press release with statistics indicating that most Americans distrust journalism.

The Agriculture Department yesterday announced $5 million in digital TV equipment grants to pubTV stations in 19 states. In less-populated areas, the department’s Rural Development grants have been supplementing the Commerce Department’s annual Public Telecommunications Facilities Program aid. Central Michigan University’s six-station network (WCMU and kin) covering the upper half of lower Michigan received the biggest sum, $750K for new digital production equipment, including a satellite uplink truck. Among the bigger checks are those payable to Northern Michigan University, the Oklahoma, Arkansas, South Dakota and Nebraska networks and KEET in Eureka, Calif. For info on the grant program, see here. Last month, another program in the agency gave grants totalling $15 million for broadband facilities to rural communities, cable companies and Indian tribes.