Opposing viewpoints: Big Bird, millionaire crony

Since Wednesday’s presidential debate, liberals have been squawking about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s pledge to end the government subsidy to the Public Broadcasting Service in an attempt to distract us from, as Charles Blow of the New York Times put it, ”President Xanax’s” dismal performance.

Their outcries against Romney’s pledge to “kill Big Bird” are nothing short of demagogic religious dogma. Liberals regard government subsidies for broadcasting as a sacrament. Their words drip with reverence.

Blow wrote, “It’s almost impossible to overstate how instrumental PBS has been in my development ... We were poor. My mother couldn’t afford day care, and I didn’t go to preschool ... I could watch one hour of television: PBS.”

Blow goes on to credit this daily hour as that which enabled him to achieve most of his major professional accomplishments. 

Even LeVar Burton of “Reading Rainbow” said of Romney, “I am personally outraged that any serious contender for the White House would target as part of his campaign the children of America in this fashion.”

Did you know that you’re anti-children of America if you support ending the subsidy to PBS?

These hysterics make me wonder, how did we raise children before PBS? How will our children learn how to count or recite the alphabet if we don’t subsidize PBS? How will they learn important social skills?

The left creates emotional pandemonium whenever talk of defunding PBS arises because they can’t argue the facts.

As Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., pointed out in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, Sesame Street “made more than $211 million from toy and consumer product sales from 2003-2006. Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell received $956,513 in compensation in 2008.”

PBS made enough to pay CEO and President Paula Kerger $632,233 in one year. Kevin Close, president emeritus of NPR, received $1.2 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Like these executives, Big Bird is a multi-millionaire.

Sesame Street is an international brand that would thrive in the private market, and it alone raises enough revenue to support PBS.

While it may be a miniscule amount of the federal budget that goes toward PBS, what does it say about us that we can’t end government subsidies even to millionaire cronies like Big Bird?

­— arcarlis@indiana.edu