Big Bird… Brought to You by the Letter $
In the 1990s, Big Bird, or Sesame Street more broadly, was the sacred symbol for Democrats too. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, looked to Sesame Street as an ideal model for the future of public broadcasting. By the 1990s, the Children’s Television Workshop, now Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit production company that makes Sesame Street, did not receive direct federal funding. Through the use of public-private partnerships and commercial business ventures, the Workshop was mostly financially independent of the government. Clinton and Gore valued public broadcasting, but wanted to see more programs adopt this model. “No one is more interested in streamlining government than President Bill Clinton and me,” Gore stated. “We want to reinvent government so that it works better and cost less, and there is nothing that works better and cost less than public broadcasting.”
Clinton and Gore’s defense of public broadcasting against constant Republican attacks to defund it did not lead to robust funding for public broadcasting. Instead, public broadcasting adopted Sesame Street’s model by partnering with private capital. Across the decade, PBS programs added corporate sponsors at the beginning and of episodes. Juicy Juice sponsored Arthur. Huggies underwrote the second season of Barney & Friends. In 1998, Sesame Street added its first corporate sponsor: a $1 million sponsorship deal from the indoor playground company, Discovery Zone.
The decision to add a corporate underwriter angered many viewers. “It’s sad that ‘Sesame Street’ would deliver children to Discovery Zone,” Gary Ruskin, a spokesman for Commercial Alert, said in reaction to the decision. “We don’t want [the Workshop] to finance ‘Sesame Street’ to the detriment of the children who watch it.”Sesame Street executives defended themselves against such attacks. Executive Gary Knell argued that Sesame Street was an attempt to produce quality children’s television with very few resources and “at a time when government funding and foundation funding have been declining.” What options were left?
The consistent attacks against public broadcasting have made it a precarious broadcasting partner for shows like Sesame Street. During Gingrich’s attacks on public broadcasting in 1995, Sesame Street producers prepared an exit strategy and started exploring the creation of a new cable network that could potentially broadcast Sesame Street instead of PBS.
In 2015, executives signed a deal with HBO (now MAX) to fund and distribute new seasons of Sesame Street. This past fall, MAX chose not to renew its contract with Sesame Street, leaving the show without a broadcasting partner for the first time in its history. Sesame Street’s future has grown more precarious with cuts to federal grants, like USAID funding for the Iraqi version of the show, Ahlan Simsim. In March, Sesame Workshop cut 20% of its staff as it continued negotiations to find a new broadcasting partner.