Humorist Jean Shepherd will be featured guest at tonight's WPBT Channel 2 dinner for The Committee of One Thousand Sponsors (people who have donated $100 or more to WPBT). The event concludes Channel 2's Declaration of Independence Week. The station is seeking enough private donation to offset cuts in federal grants and to increase local programming to make up for the elimination under pressure of most public affairs programming on public television. The pressure came from the Nixon Administration who reason that political and controversial subjects are not fit fare for public TV. Shepherd, now a New Yorker, grew up in northern Indiana. He has written books, film scripts, and plays, and acted in Broadway and Off-Broadway productions. For several years he was a regular columnist on the Village Voice and The Realist. His short stories have won four Playboy humor-satire awards, making him the only writer to win this award more than once. Shepherd was recently appointed a contributing editor of Playboy.