Too Big Bird to fail

[Geee]

Washington Examiner:

If you got all your news from the Obama campaign, you'd think Mitt Romney was on the verge of having Bain Capital buy Sesame Street, bulldoze it and turn it into a shopping mall. The Obama campaign even ran an ad Tuesday slamming Romney for his call to end federal PBS funding -- at least until Big Bird and his friends said don't drag us into this.

Well, you can all relax. Big Bird will do just fine even if federal funding for public broadcasting is cut off. In fact, if every PBS station is shut down tomorrow, that wonder-filled yellow fowl will quickly pop up elsewhere on TV.

Don't take it from me. Here's what Sherrie Westin, executive vice president of Sesame Workshop, told CNN last week: "The Sesame Workshop receives very little funding from PBS. So we are able to raise our funding through philanthropic [means and] through our licensed product."

She added: "So quite frankly, you can debate whether or not there should be funding of public broadcasting. But when they always try to [trot] out Big Bird, and say we're going to kill Big Bird -- that is actually misleading, because Sesame Street will be here ... Big Bird lives on."

This raises the question of why Big Bird and his Muppet friends need taxpayer dollars in the first place -- and why this is a controversy at all if they get so little to begin with.