Arts advocates are pushing back against President Trump’s proposed federal budget, which reopened the perennial fight over federal funding for the arts by calling for eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But this year, they’re having to do it without one of their strongest allies: Big Bird.
Long a staple of public broadcasting, Big Bird and the rest of the “Sesame Street” gang packed up and moved to HBO in 2015, which now streams the show on its HBO Kids website. Reruns can be watched on PBS channels, but the Corporation for Public Broadcasting no longer pays anything for them. Big Bird and his friends are therefore no longer dependent on government funding.
That has robbed arts advocates of one of their strongest arguments for maintaining the CPB, which funds PBS stations. The long-running children’s series is so beloved and so closely associated with PBS that “Save Big Bird,” not to mention Cookie Monster and Elmo, was an automatic and effective rallying cry in past debates.
“It doesn’t help,” conceded Sarah Edkins, spokeswoman for PEN America, one of the arts groups urging Congress not to cut off the programs. Edkins, nevertheless, downplayed the significance in an email. “We would cite other children’s shows (supported through the CPB) like ‘Curious George.’ I don’t think that overall it changes the debate.”
A Republican source on the Senate Appropriations Committee, speaking on background, offered a similar assessment.
Big Bird was front and center the last time there was a public debate over arts funding, when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called for cutting off funds for public broadcasting in a 2012 presidential debate. President Obama’s campaign gleefully mocked Romney’s stance with an ad featuring Big Bird.
PBS issued a statement in response to Romney also invoking “Sesame Street.” “For more than 40 years, Big Bird has embodied the public broadcasting mission – harnessing the power of media for the good of every citizen, regardless of where they live or their ability to pay.”
What PBS and the Obama campaign didn’t say was that “Sesame Street” was not owned by PBS. Since its creation in 1969, the show has been produced by a separate nonprofit group, Sesame Workshop. The nonprofit licensed the show to PBS but could have sold it to any other broadcaster it wanted. In 2015, it did just that, signing a five-year licensing agreement with the pay-cable channel HBO. The deal allows new episodes to be aired on PBS only after they have appeared on HBO.
That explains why this time around PBS hasn’t mentioned the show in its two statements this year calling for Congress to maintain its funding. A representative for PBS could not be reached for comment.
Sesame Workshop issued a statement supporting funding for public broadcasting but emphasizing that “Sesame Street” itself was no longer supported by tax dollars. “While Sesame Workshop currently receives no direct funding from CPB or PBS, we stand firmly and passionately in support of the vital public investment that allows them to continue this important work,” it said.
Even when it was primarily a PBS program, Sesame Workshop received little in the way of federal funds. Most of its revenue came from outside licensing deals, which PBS was not a part of. In 2012, for example, Sesame Street was licensed to PBS for $1.5 million, far short of the series’ annual production cost of $14 million. That largely explained the move to HBO, which offered Sesame Workshop a more lucrative deal. The nonprofit reported an $11 million operating loss in the 2014, the year before it made the move.
The move doesn’t mean that Big Bird and his Muppet friends are completely absent from the fight over federal arts funding. PBS and “Sesame Street” remain so intertwined in the public’s mind that the Muppets are sometimes invoked by people who apparenty haven’t heard about the move to HBO.
An April 5 New York Times op-ed by General Stanley McChrystal calling for maintaining CPB funding was adorned with a picture of the Muppets even though the general never mentioned them in the column. A March Nicholas Kristof column accused Trump of wanting to “deport Big Bird.” An April story by the liberal news site Raw Story reported that the White House asked to have “Sesame Street” characters at its annual Easter Egg hunt “just four days after President Donald Trump’s administration proposed ending all funding for PBS and the Sesame Street program.”
