Will ‘Face the Nation’ become ‘Face the World’?

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors is considering asking commercial broadcasters to donate their news programming to Voice of America and other international broadcasters. That was the word from Dana Perino, a new member of the BBG board. "Everyone agrees we should look into this," she said. "How do we repurpose things that we could acquire?" Perino indicated a starting point would be the Sunday morning interview programs – ABC's "This Week," CBS' "Face the Nation", NBC's "Meet the Press" and "Fox News Sunday."……

NPR chief Vivian Schiller: Don’t take the work of news gatherers for granted

At this time of tremendous upheaval in American news media, its leaders should not focus on transformation at the expense of fortifying and expanding concrete, on-the-ground reporting. That was the message offered Thursday by NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller as she delivered the James L. Loper Lecture in Public Service Broadcasting at USC Annenberg. "For well over a decade, at gatherings like this, news people have obsessed about transformational technologies, vanishing business models and new paradigms of mass communication," Schiller told an audience of students, faculty members and leaders of influential Los Angeles-area media who gathered at USC Town……

NPR, Juan Williams and the Clash of News and Talk

"Would you have fired Juan if you were still Vice President of News at NPR?" asked a longtime friend. He was referring of course to NPR News analyst Juan Williams' expression of concern about fellow airplane passengers in "Muslim garb." (Rhetoric note: He was trying to make the exact reverse point than his subordinate preamble suggested, so he's due demerits for poor phrasing.) My answer: It's not a hypothetical. We actually faced these same issues in the late 1980's, when I was head of NPR News: Cokie Roberts, who was covering Capitol Hill for NPR, received an offer from ABC……