Jessica Winter for Slate;

In short, Sesame Street was founded to help low-income kids keep up with their more affluent peers. That is literally why it exists. It succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. And now it is becoming the property of a premium cable network, so that a program launched to help poor kids keep up with rich kids is now being paywalled so that rich kids can watch it before poor kids can.

Why Sesame Street’s Move to HBO Is Both Great and Extremely Depressing

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing sums it up pretty well…

This turn of affairs comes from the austerity brought on by the economic crisis, which has deeply cut the public broadcasters on whom Sesame Street depends. In other words, the richest people in America, having first looted the world's bank-accounts through an act of incredible fraud, and then having benefitted from the bailouts that followed, and then having used the Republican Congress to create tax-breaks and preserve tax-loopholes, have so starved public services in America that programming created specifically to serve poor children must be optimized for the viewing of rich children, and delivered only to the poor children it was intended for after the children of the rich have tired of it.

Tags: TV