Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Saturday, October 06, 2012 4:47:48 PM
In their desperate attempts to find something in the Wednesday Night Massacre to hit Mitt Romney with, the leftists who support the Chief Dilettante Barack Um-bama have latched onto Romney's attack on taxpayer funding of public broadcasting. They are saying "Mitt Romney is attacking Big Bird!"
I have a few thoughts and facts on that.
The first Sesame Street episode aired in November of 1969. I know, I was home sick from school that day and I saw it. That's almost 43 years ago. At that time public broadcasting arguably had a purpose. They provided educational and cultural programming that the three major networks weren't providing very much of. However, as a very eye-opening book called "Public Broadcasting and the Public Trust" revealed back in 1995, PBS very quickly began betraying the public trust by becoming highly biased and thus highly untrustworthy. The book also pointed out that the CPB, which owns Sesame Street and the licensing rights for Sesame Street-related products, has in some years brought in more income that the entire National Hockey League! Crying poverty for the CPB will get you no sympathy from me.
Furthermore, the need that PBS was meant to fill at its inception no longer exists. Thanks to the advancement of technology, we now have cable and satellite stations covering myriad educational, cultural, and historical topics and tastes. We have Nickelodeon, History Channel, Military Channel, A&E, and many others who somehow manage to exist without taxpayer dollars. The taxpayer funding is no longer needed and the need no longer exists.
Big Bird and his layabout chums have been on welfare for 43 years. It's high time they got off their taxpayer-funded couches and started paying their own way.