Romney wants to cut funding for PBS and Sesame Street

[Drtooth]

The more I see the actual ad, the more I think it was supposed to be an inhouse joke that they put on the web, and then someone thought it was a good idea to use as a real ad to paint Romney as a cold uncaring industrialist that only cares about his rich buddies he can take advantage of/can take advantage of him. That was how they were winning back when Romney was spouting Freudian slips and stories where everyone gets fired.

 

[Vincent L]

I really have no idea how the funding of PBS affects Sesame Street. Am I missing something?

 

[Drtooth]

I really have no idea how the funding of PBS affects Sesame Street. Am I missing something?

As near as I can tell, it's probably the money that PBS uses to buy the episodes. I don't know if the money goes directly to Sesame Workshop before it hits PBS, but it costs a lot to air a TV show. That's how regular television works. The show is funded by advertisements, and when the ratings go down, ad revenue goes down, and the network threatens whoever's producing the show to lower the budget or screw with the show to get the ratings back. What Sesame Street gets from Uncle Sam, regardless if it's handed down from PBS, is a drop in the bucket of a drop in the bucket. In perspective, the over 400 million that goes to PBS is paltry compared to the national budget, but it's quite welcome to PBS.

And I swear they spend the bulk of it on BBC shows. Not even the good ones (except Sherlock, which is a Frogsend. Why the heck don't they repeat that for pledge month?).