Every once in a while, NPR or PBS finds itself the target of critics who accuse it of violating some broadcast or journalistic standard. A lot of the time, neither company has anything to do with the transgression in question.

Two recent web exposés about public broadcasting illustrate some weaknesses in the way the public radio and public TV industries operate—and define themselves. This is a issue that creates very real PR problems for well-respected institutions like PBS and NPR.

It has a very simple solution, too, but weird imbalances in the systems mean that it’s unlikely it ever will be fixed.

Salon has an exposé of a show run widely on public television stations across the country. It’s about a guy who has a self-produced TV show partly about how to “prevent” Alzheimer’s disease. The Salon writer, a neurologist, says that medicine doesn’t know how to avoid or prevent Alzheimer’s and that the measures the show promotes aren’t proven.

Meanwhile, Slate last week attacked a public radio series called “The Infinite Mind.” The writers charged that the show’s producers used experts who had various financial connections to drug companies.

You can read the stories yourself and judge them on their merits.

I’m more interested in how both displayed an ignorance of the structure of the public television and public radio industries. The Salon story mentioned PBS in the lede; the Slate story mentioned NPR in the lede. But neither organization had anything to do with the creation of the story under attack. (I have a trifecta of a disclosure here—I used to work for, and am close to people who work at, NPR, Salon, and Slate.)

PBS, for example, doesn’t produce programs and doesn’t quote unquote own or control any stations: It just funds certain programs, mostly through prominent stations in large cities. It didn’t fund the show in question. Public TV stations are independent entities and decide on their own what to run. Generally any given station’s most popular shows are PBS-funded stuff like “The NewsHour” and “Antiques Roadshow,” but what the station runs the rest of the day comes from a variety of different sources.

In the public radio world, NPR status is different from PBS’s in the public TV world in all sorts of ways: It was formed by public radio stations to supply news programming. The division of the company called “NPR News” (which is where I used to work) creates and produces actual news shows, like “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.” Over the years the parent company has taken on many technical and engineering responsibilities for the public radio world, and among other things it also syndicates, but doesn’t control or produce, certain other boutique operations, like popular interview shows featuring Terry Gross or Diane Rehm, and “Car Talk.”

(But not “This America Life” or “Prairie Home Companion,” produced by which originated out of an effective competitor to NPR’s syndication arm, Public Radio International.)

(Don’t even ask me about APM; that’s where things get really complicated.)

The public radio world is based on independent, local control of stations. NPR has zero effective control over what any station does. I don’t mean that in a coy way: NPR can’t and doesn’t exercise control over any public radio station, period.

The brand “NPR” looms large—many people refer to their “local NPR station.” But that’s nonetheless a meaningless thing to say, because there is no such thing. In fact, NPR’s relationship to the station is essentially that of the Associated Press’s to most newspapers. The Memphis Commercial Appeal might run a lot of NYT wire copy, but that doesn’t make it an “New York Times paper.”

But NPR’s branding of those famous NPR News shows are effective, and listeners probably don’t notice when the stations themselves describe the connection slightly differently—they will generally use the term “NPR member station.”

In other words, PBS is a sugar daddy. NPR is a wire service. Neither are networks, in the CBS or NBC sense of the term.

But this is lost on listeners, and many journalists.

PBS ombudsman Michael Getler writes here about the Salon article. He makes the same point about PBS branding that I just did about NPR’s; that when the letters “PBS” loom so large on the screen on some shows, listeners can be forgiven for not making a distinction when the letters are absent.

NPR’s ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, who began after I left and whom I’ve never met, has her take on the brouhaha prompted by the Slate article here. I think her article is muddled and seems not to have had an editor, so it’s hard to figure out its position.

NPR’s connection to the independent show slammed in the Slate story is slightly complicated. The show ran on many public radio stations, but was not produced or distributed by NPR. But the show was picked up and run on one of the two NPR stations on the Sirius satellite service.

These carry the NPR brand, but are to some extent stepchildren. (The NPR member stations don’t want the big-draw shows they fund, like “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” on satellite, because it could draw listeners away from terrestrial outlets.)

Among other things, Shepard’s column doesn’t make this distinction clear; nor does it tell readers who in NPR is actually responsible for programming the Sirius channels. Shepard does quote my former colleague Margaret Low Smith, who says the sensible and correct thing:

“If we are going to put a show up on our Sirius service, our expectation is it will live up to NPR standards and if it doesn’t, it can become an issue.”

That said, it should also be said this is a hugely minor issue. The NYT owns a lot of smaller papers; if the Santa Rosa Press Democrat runs a Sunday wire feature that comes under attack for its use of sources, it’s important, and should be dealt with, but it’s not suddenly a “New York Times story.”

I think it’s a mark of how ineffective both the PBS and NPR ombudsmen are that neither make the obvious recommendation: Both public radio and public TV stations should just make it a habit to run periodic public service-style announcements that explain, in trenchant, conversational language, how the system works. (There’s a response from PBS’s Michael Getler here.)

The odd balance of power in both worlds, however, make this unlikely. The people responsible in each of those stories are the individual station programmers who ran them. But it’s the national brands that suffer when problems like this come to light. NPR can’t run a legend during “All Things Considered” that says, in effect, “Hey, this is an NPR News show; don’t hold us responsible for the other crazy stuff this station runs during the rest of the broadcast day.”