Rick Steves

I was flipping channels on Wednesday night when I came across a pledge campaign on D.C. PBS station WHUT (Howard University Television). Travel-show host Rick Steves was doing the usual spiel about how PBS is a “national treasure” that assumes we’re intelligent people.

But then came the usual hustle: Steves said PBS “is a TV station that treats us not like consumers, but like neighbors.” Then for the next five minutes, Steves undermined that by describing all the goodies you could get if you pledged $60 or $160, like DVDs of every travel show Rick Steves has ever made.

Travel writer and public television personality Rick Steves lauded Europeans's "more relaxed" attitude about nudity in public and on television while labeling Americans "overly prudish" by comparison in a Tuesday column on CNN.com: "I like a continent where the human body is considered a divine work of art worth admiring openly."

Steves's ode to European nudity began six paragraphs into the column, "European nudes and American prudes," after he gave a detailed sketch of his 1978 experience at a Turkish bath: "Any traveler to Europe who's visited a bath, perused a newsstand, hung out at a beach or park on a sunny day, or channel-surfed broadcast TV late at night has noticed that Europeans are more relaxed than Americans about nudity."

The writer, who, back in 2003, feared that the American flag was being "hijacked" as a "logo" for support of the war in Iraq, then spent several paragraphs describing how widespread this practice is on the European continent and how apparently great it is (including his "overly prudish" label about Americans):