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Apr 12, 2004

Ira Glass toiled at humdrum radio stories for eight years before he showed any sign of developing a unique voice, he tells the Los Angeles Daily News.
An aggressive ad campaign touts WEIU, a tiny public TV station in eastern Illinois, as "your new choice for PBS." The slogan annoys its northern public TV neighbor WILL to no end, according to the Campaign News-Gazette.
The PBS broadcast of Shroud of Christ?, presented April 7 on Secrets of the Dead, has drawn complaints from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. The presentation was "a study in pseudoscience, faulty logic, and the suppression of historical facts," writes a CSICOP senior researcher. "The intellectual incompetence or outright dishonesty of the show's producers is matched only by that of the PBS executives who foisted it on a credulous Easter-season audience."
The Washington Post tries adding some perspective to the reassignment of Bob Edwards, but makes little progress in untangling the PR web behind it. (Reg. req.) "We have all heard of people rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic," writes a Louisville Courier-Journal columnist. "[NPR's Jay] Kernis is throwing deck chairs overboard from the company flagship." (More in the San Francisco Chronicle.)
Was Emma Goldman a fraud, a killer or a real revolutionary? PBS viewers won't find the answer in tonight's American Experience, writes a New York Times reviewer. By ignoring the question, the film "forgoes an opportunity to illuminate the link between idealism and terrorism and to gauge the relevance of Goldman to our accursed world."