Recently I wrote about a guest column from former first ladies who asked Arkansas public television to move "PBS NewsHour" back to 6 p.m. (from 10 p.m.) and restore "Washington Week with the Atlantic" to the broadcast lineup, rather than streaming only. I praised the former first ladies' fundraising, which was genuinely impressive--$2.1 million in about three months after Congress ended the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

But I disagreed with what came next--the suggestion that a gift of that size carries a line-item veto over the schedule of a network with a $13 million budget (or any budget, for that matter). Programming belongs to Executive Director Carlton Wing, who answers to a public commission appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate that Arkansans elect. That chain runs to the voters, not to a donor list, however distinguished.

Then Leon Kaplan responded with a guest column. And I wrote about that, too. He recited the history of CPB's circular funding scheme that mimicked, well, my description of CPB's circular funding scheme. And he scolded me for preferring "The Odd Couple" and "Barney Miller"--a lure I set--without his explaining why decades of imported British sitcoms built on flaccid innuendo satisfy public television's educational mission while two American shows about New Yorkers don't.

Thereafter, my colleague John Brummett asked whether the great PBS war in Arkansas is ending and answered that we have a tenuous ceasefire, with the war dormant until something rouses it.

He's right. It has wound down. Everyone has said his piece, the shooting has stopped, and there's nothing further to add.

But, uh, I have a few things to add.

Brummett and I reach the same arithmetic from opposite ends. He writes that PBS enthusiasts are a great majority of Arkansas TV's viewership, but that its viewership is a tiny fraction........

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