He is going to be working on Wide Angle. I also love me some PBS. This is good news.

Anchoring “Wide Angle,” a weekly public affairs series with a global focus, offers the chance “to work in an environment where people just think about making good TV and good journalism,” Brown said.

“By the end (of an episode), you understand the world you live in and how it’s connected to you,” he said Saturday.

Brown, 59, who left CNN in November 2005 during a shake-up that gave his time slot to rising star Anderson Cooper, said he was contractually barred from working in TV until last June. He’s been teaching at Arizona State University as its first Walter Cronkite Professor of Journalism.

“Wide Angle” begins its seventh season July 1. PBS planned to announce Brown’s hiring on Monday.

Brown has distinguished himself as an anchor by avoiding a “booming voice-of-God” approach and instead delivering news as a storyteller, said Stephen Segaller, director of national production at Thirteen/WNET, the New York station that produces “Wide Angle.”

Besides his distinctive on-camera demeanor, Brown has “a good sense of what international stories will mean to American audiences and how the stories will play,” Segaller said.

Brown contrasted the work he expects to do at PBS with how cable television operated at times during his tenure.

“I don’t want to get into the business of indicting cable TV, but some of what went on was just television, not journalism,” he said. Expanding on his comments, he said that cable TV is a tough business that can be pushed into focusing on sensational, “tabloidy stories.”

Welcome back, Mr. Brown.