APTS sent this letter to CPB Board Chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson on June 7, 2005, after media reported that he favors the appointment of former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Patricia Harrison as CPB president. The letter refers to an earlier letter from the Iowa Public Broadcasting Board to the CPB Board. Dear Mr. Tomlinson: The Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) is a nonprofit membership organization established to represent the interests of its members — the nation’s public television stations. APTS works closely with individual station representatives to produce effective national policies and strategies that allow stations to fulfill their individual local missions.

“I am the observer,” says Daniel Schorr in the Washington Post as he reflects on what turned him into a journalist. “Other people do things while I describe them.” (Via Romenesko.)

The new ombudsman at the New York Times, Byron Calame, endorses the newspaper’s decision to appoint a separate newsroom veteran, the “standards editor”, to promote journalistic values and give the ombudsman fewer faults to find.

CPB’s general counsel has taken the FCC job vacated by her new boss. Donna Gregg, CPB’s top lawyer since October 2002, will be the commission’s Media Bureau chief, succeeding Ken Ferree, now acting president at CPB. Like her new boss, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, Gregg is a Duke University grad who worked at the Wiley, Rein & Fielding law firm. Ferree went to Georgetown with Michael Powell, Martin’s predecessor as FCC chairman.

The FCC has granted 17 construction permits for low-power FM stations, reports Radio World.

Media Matters for America and its new blog offspring, Hands Off Public Broadcasting, see inadequate balance in CPB’s pair of ombudsmen. While William Schulz “is clearly a conservative, the other, Ken Bode, is hardly a liberal.”

“I think radio needs a lot more silliness,” says Garrison Keillor in the Boston Globe.

Sound Money is changing its name to Marketplace Money.

NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin and two colleagues joined Diane Rehm today to discuss the CPB ombuds and other aspects of their field. (First hour.)

“We want members who are responsive to readers, not to governments or lobby groups,” said NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin in the New York Times, explaining the decision of the Organization of News Ombudsmen to deny full membership to CPB’s new ombuds.

“PBS does not belong to any single constituency, no one political party, no activist group, no foundation, no funder, no agenda of any kind,” asserted PBS President Pat Mitchell in a National Press Club speech reported by the Los Angeles Times. She declined to mud-wrestle with CPB Chair Ken Tomlinson: “I really don’t feel it’s my place to judge the motivations of someone.”

Right-wing media watchdog L. Brent Bozell tappity-taps on a wedge between public TV and Bill Moyers: “Earth to PBS: When you are under attack for being a nest of left-wingers, it might not be the best strategy to let your most identifiable left-wing stars go to radical-left conferences and attack conservatives as evil.” From a webzine, National Ledger.

The irony of the debate over objectivity and balance within public radio is that “the marketplace has no issues with it,” writes consultant John Sutton on his blog.

Pat Mitchell, then president of PBS, delivered this talk May 24, 2005, at the National Press Club, in the midst of escalating news coverage of the conflict between public TV and Kenneth Tomlinson, then chair of CPB. Mitchell was preparing to announce recommendations for public TV’s future, but the Digital Futures Initiative report was delayed until December 2005, after Tomlinson had quit CPB and the dust was clearing. Since becoming president of PBS, I’ve often been at podiums like this one, with audiences like this one, although perhaps not as well informed or well prepared as a National Press Club gathering or one with so many familiar faces, those of friends and colleagues in public broadcasting.

The sole black employee at Milwaukee’s WUWM-FM has filed a racial discrimination complaint with Wisconsin’s Equal Rights Division, reports the Journal Sentinel.