NewscomaGot A Two-Pack Habit And A Motel Tan

And color me happy. I always liked Aaron Brown when he was at ABC in the mornings and I thought he was fine at night until that sexy Anderson Cooper got everyone’s dander up. Don’t get me wrong, I like AC too but there is just something steady and dare I say it, intelligent about our guy Aaron.

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.

You betcha we do.

In an editorial in the New York Times last week, this question was posed as the current White House Administration goes for the eighth year running to cut in half the funding for the two traditional entities.

This has been a running problem for PBS and NPR affiliates around the country and as a whole, and there isn’t any doubt that we are going to see some fundraising efforts that have ultimately saved both the television and radio networks.

PBS is now competing in a market of hundreds and hundreds of cable networks who have specialized in niches of programming. There isn’t any doubt that PBS has an uphill battle in competing with, let’s say, Discovery. But on the other hand, PBS’ distinctive voice represents not only tradition but a level-head. NPR’s audience has grown incidentally.

And the, “it’s so liberal” argument doesn’t work anymore:

In public television especially it used to be axiomatic that attacks on the budget were retaliation for perceived liberal bias. Newt Gingrich was quite upfront about punishing PBS when he began his budgetary onslaught back in 1995. By now, though, that war ought to be over. These days the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is run by Republicans, and a few years ago, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, who was chairman of its board, wasn’t the least bit shy about trying to arm-wrestle stations into running a program whose host was Paul Gigot, editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Unless you count occasional outbursts of hand-wringing earnestness on the part of Bill Moyers or David Brancaccio on “Now,” it’s hard now to see anything resembling liberal excess on PBS, if there ever was such a thing.

I love me some Bill Moyer hand-wringing earnestness, but I digress.

As for NPR, we lost our affiliate about two years ago here in northwest Tennessee and it’s now a Contemporary Christian station that I believe is also satellite based. I can now only pick NPR if the sun is in the right position and the winds are blowing in from Bakersfield, if I’m lucky, out of Senatobia/Memphis.

NPR grows and still has a wonderful vibrant and calm voice in a sea of satellite radio. As for PBS, our local station offers local programming and allows us a window to the world outside of our rural community which is more than just being another television station.

It’s a part of us.

PBS has taken some hits, there isn’t any doubt. But less money isn’t going to help, campers. And watchers and listeners do their part in raising funds.

And although the editorial doesn’t mention it, the children’s programming in invaluable.

So, do we need PBS and NPR.

Yes. Yes we do.

It’s something to think about.