{"id":182543,"date":"2015-08-16T20:34:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T01:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/08\/16\/todays-lesson-from-sesame-street\/"},"modified":"2015-08-16T20:34:00","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T01:34:00","slug":"todays-lesson-from-sesame-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/08\/16\/todays-lesson-from-sesame-street\/","title":{"rendered":"Today&#8217;s Lesson from Sesame Street"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Silly poor kids, <a href=\"http:\/\/gawker.com\/sesame-street-teaches-poor-kids-educational-tv-isnt-fo-1723980319\">educational TV is for rich kids<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">For more than four decades, the television show <i>Sesame Street<\/i>  has existed to teach children lessons. Today\u2019s lesson is that people  without disposable household income are in an inferior position and  should be happy to receive secondhand goods. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The original purpose of <i>Sesame Street <\/i>was  to provide uplifting educational programming to the widest possible  audience of young children. Yesterday, the Sesame Workshop, the  nonprofit that produces the program, announced that for the next five  years, new episodes will not run on the nonprofit, over-the-air Public  Broadcasting Service, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sesameworkshop.org\/press-releases\/sesame-workshop-and-hbo-announce-partnership\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">will be distributed through HBO<\/a>, a premium cable channel owned by the for-profit Time Warner media megacorporation. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">In  the press release, Sesame Workshop CEO Jeffrey Dunn described the  arrangement as \u201ca true winning public-private partnership model.\u201d What  does this winning model entail? It entails removing public goods and  services from the commons, to repackage them as luxury products for  affluent consumers.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Now Sesame Street will be restricted to a network that reaches less than one-third of American households. According to the announcement, with the money it gets from HBO, Sesame Street \u201cwill be able to produce almost twice as much new content as previous seasons.\u201d And poor kids won\u2019t be able to see any of it.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n<p>Or, more precisely, they will be able to see it after the expiration of a nine-month HBO window of exclusivity\u2014at which point the no-longer-new episodes will be passed on to PBS, while the children whose parents can afford to pay for premium cable are watching new-new episodes. The old <i>Sesame Street<\/i> block has been gentrified, so that HBO can build a sleek high-rise with a separate poor door.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We have become an ugly society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Silly poor kids, educational TV is for rich kids: For more than four decades, the television show Sesame Street has existed to teach children lessons. Today\u2019s lesson is that people without disposable household income are in an inferior position and should be happy to receive secondhand goods. The original purpose of Sesame Street was to &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,969,1143,1077],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-evil","category-inequality","category-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182543"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}