‘Sesame Street’ Was Always Political – The New York Times (Connecting the Dots: Sesame Street, CNN, FDA, Soros, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson)
December 12, 2021
Critic’s Notebook
The beloved children’s show has been a recurrent
culture-war target, but a documentary on HBO shows how social purpose was built
into it.
https://thearizonadailynews.com/sesame-street-was-always-political-the-new-york-times/
There’s a rule in politics, or at least there should be:
Never get into
a fight with Big Bird. You end up spitting out feathers, and
the eight-foot fowl just strolls away singing about the alphabet.
In the 2012 election, Mitt Romney repeatedly
argued for cutting public-TV subsidies and having the beloved
character share the screen with ads — “I’m afraid Big Bird is going to have to
get used to Kellogg’s Corn Flakes” — opening himself to attacks that he cared
more about Wall Street than about “Sesame
Street.”
In November, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas,
became the latest pol to find the big yellow target irresistible. After the
Twitter account for Big Bird announced that
the character had gotten a Covid-19
vaccine, following a CNN
and “Sesame Street” town
hall on vaccines for kids, Cruz called the
tweet “Government propaganda…for your 5 year old!”
Leave aside the dubious claim that promoting childhood
vaccination, a cornerstone of public health and schools, is “propaganda.”
Disregard how Cruz ignores that Big Bird was promoting the measles vaccine a
half-century ago. (Cruz, after all, is the same cultural savant who once
considered it a burn to label Democrats “the
party of Lisa Simpson.”) And forget that, for decades, liberal and
conservative parents have loved “Sesame Street” for its noncommercial
wholesomeness.
Cruz was at least on to one larger truth: “Sesame
Street” is political, and it has been from the beginning.
It is political not in a partisan sense but because the
way we teach and protect children — and choose which children to teach and
protect — is inevitably bound up in politicized ideas.
This, beyond the fond memories of Bert and Ernie and the
Count, is the focus of the sweetly engaging documentary “Street Gang: How We
Got to Sesame Street,” directed by Marilyn Agrelo, which airs Monday on HBO.
Drawing on the book “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street,” by
Michael Davis, it uses file footage and new interviews to detail the early
years of a puppet revolution.
“Sesame Street,” which premiered in 1969, was the project
of Joan
Ganz Cooney, a TV executive who was originally more interested
in the civil rights movement than in education but came to see the connection
between the two. “The people who control the system read,” she once said, “and
the people who make it in the system read.” And she believed that the best way
to get the kids of the 1960s to read, paradoxically, was through TV.
Her Children’s Television Workshop brought together
educators and entertainers, including a puppeteer named Jim Henson and the
director Jon Stone, an idealist attracted to Cooney’s idea of closing the
literacy gap for inner-city Black children. “I think what drew Dad in really
had to do with her political vision,” his daughter Kate Stone Lucas says in the
documentary. (Stone died in
1997.)
As “Street Gang” lays out, the show’s very setting — a
city street, not a fantasy castle or picket-fenced house — said something about
the range of children it sought to welcome. The racially diverse cast of
grown-ups and kids said something. “Sesame Street” was open and public and
real, as real as a block where humans hung out with furry monsters could be.
“I saw it as a political show,” says Sonia
Manzano, who played Maria, because of its casting and its
determination to raise conversations that kids’ TV wasn’t used to having.
Matt Robinson, the first actor to play Gordon, voiced the
’70s-era Muppet Roosevelt Franklin, who was created to represent Black children
in the audience. The singer Buffy Sainte-Marie nursed a baby while
explaining breastfeeding to Big Bird. The Rev. Jesse Jackson led kids in a
call-and-response of “I am somebody!”
Big Bird, whose character evolved early on from a goofy
oaf to a curious child, has often been the young audience’s surrogate, just as
he was when he offered up a wing to teach kids about the vaccine. The most
memorable and moving example came when Will Lee, the actor who played the
shopkeeper Mr. Hooper, died.
The show wrote the death into an
episode, in which Big Bird learned that when people die, they don’t
come back.
Out of the box, “Sesame Street” was a rara avis: a
mass-market hit on public TV, a kids’ show with sophistication and a wild
countercultural energy. It even surprised the people who made it.
“We’re shooting this show, and you see this ugly bird,”
the cameraman Frank
Biondo says in the documentary. “I remember thinking, ‘Who’s
gonna watch this [expletive brought to you by the letter S]?’”
But it was not universally loved. A Mississippi state TV
commission refused
to air “Sesame Street” after complaints about the racially
integrated cast. Local commercial affiliates picked up the show, knowing a hit
when they saw one, and the board eventually reversed
the vote.
It’s easy today to feel superior to this racial history,
or to forget it. When Sesame Street introduced
a Korean American Muppet this year, Matt Schlapp, the president
of the Conservative Political Action Committee, called the addition “insane” on
Twitter. “I grew up watching, and it was never about race,” he said on Fox
News. (Someone inform Roosevelt Franklin.)
“Street Gang” cuts off around the end of the Jim Henson
era (Henson died in
1990); Elmo gets just a fleeting glance, and decades of history,
including the move of
the flagship show to HBO, go unnoted. So the documentary doesn’t
examine the show’s cast and format changes, or the question of whether it would
or could have been created today, in an era of many more TV options for
children (albeit more commercial ones).
But as culture-war skirmishes like Cruz’s show, more has
changed since “Sesame Street” began than the number of TV outlets. The
L.B.J.-Nixon era that gave us the show was polarized too, yet the series
reflected at least some 20th-century consensus about the role of institutions,
from government to medicine to TV networks. It was not outlandish that
Washington would take a role in teaching kids through the country’s most
popular mass medium. (Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, once an
arch-conservative presidential nominee, was one of the most
potent early defenders of “Sesame Street.”)
Now, in a time of fractured media and politics, characters from an HBO Max show do a CNN vaccination special that gets zapped on Twitter by a senator looking to score points with the Fox News audience. It’s a bigger media universe than when “Sesame Street” first tried to cram the whole world into one block. But we live in smaller and smaller neighborhoods.
Connecting the Dots:
Sesame Street is a program for
the Sesame Workshop.
Carnegie Corporation of New York funded
study that led to creation of the Sesame
Workshop and a funder for the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace (think tank).
David A. Hamburg is
the president emeritus for the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, an adviser for the Nuclear Threat Initiative (think tank)
and Margaret A. Hamburg’s father.
Ted Turner is a co-chairman for the Nuclear Threat Initiative (think tank) and the
founder of CNN.
Margaret A. Hamburg
is the VP for the Nuclear Threat Initiative
(think tank), David A. Hamburg’s daughter
and was a commissioner for the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration (FDA).
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (think
tank) was a funder for the Nuclear
Threat Initiative (think tank).
Open Society Foundations was a
funder for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace (think tank).
George Soros is the founder & chairman
for the Open Society Foundations
and was the chairman for the Foundation to
Promote Open Society.
Foundation to Promote Open Society was
a funder for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace (think tank).
Donald Kennedy was
a trustee at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace (think tank) and a commissioner for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Jessica
Tuchman Mathews was the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (think tank),
an honorary trustee at the Brookings
Institution (think tank) and is a director at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (think tank).
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (think
tank) was a funder for the Nuclear
Threat Initiative (think tank).
Ed Griffin’s interview
with Norman Dodd in 1982
(The investigation into the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace uncovered the plans for “Population Control” by involving the United States in
war)
http://www.illuminati-news.com/110106a.htm
Carnegie Corporation of New York a
funder for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace (think tank) and funded study that led to
creation of the Sesame Workshop.
Open Society Foundations was a
funder for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace (think tank).
George Soros is the founder & chairman
for the Open Society Foundations
and was the chairman for the Foundation to
Promote Open Society.
Foundation to Promote Open Society was
a funder for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace (think tank) and the Brookings Institution (think tank).
Mark B. McClellan was
a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution (think tank) a commissioner for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is
a director at Johnson & Johnson.
Joan Ganz Cooney
served on several committees and corporate boards, including Johnson & Johnson.
Ann Dibble Jordan was
a director at Johnson & Johnson
and is an honorary trustee at the Brookings
Institution (think tank).
Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, LLP was
a lobby firm for the Johnson & Johnson
and is a lobby firm for Pfizer Inc.
Vernon E. Jordan
Jr. is a senior counsel for Akin,
Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, LLP and an honorary trustee at
the Brookings Institution (think tank).
Constance J.
Horner was a guest scholar at the Brookings
Institution (think tank) and is a director at Pfizer Inc.
Suzanne Nora
Johnson is a trustee at the Brookings
Institution (think tank) and a director at Pfizer Inc.
Amy W. Schulman is
a trustee at the Brookings Institution
(think tank) and the EVP & general counsel for Pfizer Inc.
Teresa Heinz
Kerry is an honorary trustee at the Brookings
Institution (think tank) and married to John F. Kerry.
John
F. Kerry is married to Teresa
Heinz Kerry, the secretary at the U.S.
Department of State for the Barack
Obama administration and Cameron
F. Kerry’s brother.
Cameron F. Kerry is
a fellow at the Brookings Institution
(think tank), John F. Kerry’s brother,
and a senior counsel at Sidley Austin LLP.
Michelle Obama was
a lawyer at Sidley Austin LLP.
Barack
Obama was an intern at Sidley
Austin LLP.
Sidley Austin LLP was a lobby firm
for Pfizer Inc. & Johnson & Johnson.
Newton N. Minow is
a senior counsel at Sidley Austin LLP,
a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago
and an honorary trustee at the Carnegie
Corporation of New York.
Carnegie Corporation of New York funded
study that led to creation of the Sesame Workshop
and a funder for the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace (think tank).
Sesame Street is a program for
the Sesame Workshop.
David A. Hamburg is
the president emeritus for the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, an adviser for the Nuclear Threat Initiative (think tank)
and Margaret A. Hamburg’s father.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (think
tank) was a funder for the Nuclear
Threat Initiative (think tank).
Ted
Turner is a co-chairman for the Nuclear
Threat Initiative (think tank) and the founder of CNN.
Margaret A. Hamburg is the VP for the Nuclear Threat Initiative (think tank), David A. Hamburg’s daughter and was a commissioner for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Resources: Past Research
New Sesame Street Video Features Elmo Saying ‘Get
Vaccinated’ (Past Research on Sesame Street &
the FDA)
SUNDAY, APRIL 19, 2015
https://thesteadydrip.blogspot.com/2015/04/new-sesame-street-video-features-elmo.html
Charleston: CNN’s Sick
Pattern of Using the Dead as Political Weapons Against the Right (Past Research on CNN)
SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2015
https://thesteadydrip.blogspot.com/2015/06/charleston-cnns-sick-pattern-of-using.html
FDA Fails to Protect
Americans from Dangerous Drugs and Unsafe Foods (Past
Research on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA))
SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2015
https://thesteadydrip.blogspot.com/2015/05/fda-fails-to-protect-americans-from.html
IG Farben / Bayer /
Pfizer / Israel (Past Research on Pfizer, a
Manufacture of the COVID 19 Vaccine)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2021
https://thesteadydrip.blogspot.com/2021/09/ig-farben-bayer-pfizer-israel.html
John Kerry to Deliver
Major Address on Israel on Wednesday (Past Research
on John & Cameron Kerry)
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2016
https://thesteadydrip.blogspot.com/2016/12/john-kerry-to-deliver-major-address-on.html
Joan Ganz Cooney
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Ganz_Cooney#Later_years
Cooney served on several committees and corporate boards, including the Mayo Foundation, Chase Manhattan Bank, Johnson & Johnson, and Metropolitan Life Insurance.
Johnson's Baby Powder
and Ovarian Cancer (Past Research on Johnson &
Johnson)
SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2016
https://thesteadydrip.blogspot.com/2016/04/johnsons-baby-powder-and-ovarian-cancer.html
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