Netflix takes Sesame Street as spoils of the defunding of public broadcasting.
The point of the project was always privatization, and I'm appalled that there are people on social media celebrating Sesame Street being taken over by Netflix.
Good gravy don't buy into the "privatization will save us from authoritarianism" narrative.
I really am disturbed by the amount of people on social media celebrating Netflix buying Sesame Street as some kind of win. The right wing has won on this because this was always the outcome desired - privatization. It's shocking to see people on social media even gushing about having a reason now to subscribe to Netflix. What? It's hard to believe these aren't paid trolls. (I'm not the only person who notices that's rampant yes, even on Bluesky. The bots go where the marks are, it's the watering hole effect.) One person even told me that it's pragmatic to accept it and not object to privatization. I've heard this propaganda advice a lot, to just let go, surrender, don't object, and just the MAGA right-wing wash over you. This is a type of controlled opposition narrative, far right framing gets surprisingly easily embraced by random people on the internet who consider themselves somewhere on the left. The person who was insisting I be pragmatic started by saying that Netflix had made Sesame Street "safe" from "the right".
An interesting aside, this person also said that "as a latchkey kid" Sesame Street was important to them. Sesame Street's prime target viewer age range is toddlers up to kindergarten age. I didn't watch Sesame Street (nor Hatchy Milatchy) much beyond kindergarten. I was watching Doctor Who and Monty Python on the local PBS station by then. Perhaps I'm the weirdo though?
Hatchy Milatchy was a very popular show for kids locally produced by WNEP, the local ABC affiliate station in northeastern Pennsylvania. It was on the air from 1956 to 1997, so Boomers, GenX, and Millenials remember, but anyone younger probably only heard of it if they're superfans of The Office (US version set in Scranton Pennsylvania) and have done a deep dive into the "Take Your Daughter To Work Day" episode. (I've never actually watched The Office, because I always worried I would just wind up complaining about how it wasn't reflecting the reality of local office workplaces in northeastern Pennsylvania!)
In the first decades of broadcast radio and television people generally wanted to use broadcast for utilitarian as well as cool purposes, and saw fundraising, subsidies, or advertising to make it happen as a secondary way to get to the goal. Within my lifetime the entire orientation shifted to where we're supposed to believe it’s only all about making money, and if the American consumer gets some product or some service out of it we should see that profiteering as a gift, because results like products and services are no longer the purpose of any business. It's clear since the Great Recession that's the model, and there was never even any meaningful chastising of the people who did it, let alone accountability, they were bailed out and now we're living in the world of that moral hazard. And voila, it’s the accepted position.
The truth here is that Sesame Street has been privatized for profit, this is the last nail in that coffin, on a decades long project to kneecap the public good. It will mean that it's put under an editorial Sword of Damocles, controlled by a streaming company known for dubious business decisions that materially affected the quality of cinema culture with their economic tactics.
Tech Won't Save Us - 25 01 09 [#258] What Netflix Has Done to Movies Will Tavlin Paris Marx is joined by Will Tavlin to discuss how the Netflix model transformed film into the Typical Netflix Movie and how the company uses claims about data to deceive the public.
Richer kids will always get these things first. So please don't whinge around about it going to reruns on PBS Kids anyway. That's not the same. Many of us rightly find it offensive to put premium gate keeping on an educational program for kids that was created out of taxpayer funding. And it doesn't have to be this way. We know it doesn't have to be that way because PBS did Sesame Street very successfully in a way most people liked it for decades. There was no need to change it, and no large constituency that wanted to outside of a minority of elites in the business class who resent society and hate democracy.
Ordinary people are so desperate for not just a win, but a saviour, and there is no shortage of people out on social media ready to sell you some spin like that. But Netflix just isn't the solution to this, and could never be so. In fact it's more likely to destroy good things in the end, because all these corporate executives always kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, we've seen this over and over again. The tycoons and the moguls manage to take over something great, and then run it into the ground just trying to extract more profit from it than is reasonable or even possible.
These moguls do the equivalent of going into a vacation resort that everyone loves and is booked solid because it's priced right, has a beautiful gazebo on a nice beach for weddings, a lovely well maintained swimming pool, and comfortable bungalows with lovely views, and the new management fails to repair after a storm, and they don't maintain the pool and it gets a reputation for stinking, and they knock down the gazebo and still raise the prices. They do this with everything from Toys R Us to Twitter, because there are no rules stopping it.
Moguls kill golden geese at will, because for whatever reason, people who extract wealth only understand their desire for money, not what makes something worth anything.
There was a resort in Xpu-ha Mexico with an ecological park with animals and an aviary. I went there for my birthday in 2002 and it was lovely despite just having been damaged by 2 hurricanes in the weeks before and repairs were ongoing. After another hurricane in 2005 it’s since fallen into disrepair for a couple of decades. There has been gossip online for years about the abandonment because it had what's described as almost a cult-like interest in the resort. Rumour was that management priorities changed and then after the economy tanked in the Great Recession the fate was sealed. At least in this case it’s possible that there’s some government rule protecting the cenote, but given that a youtuber found evidence that it was being actively frequented, and all the youtubes about it, I don’t know how well that’s going.
There are so many examples of how things that are worthwhile or desirable always need maintenance. There's no system of set it and forget it. The public good isn't going to be fixed with some political crockpot. Nothing is like that. And the anti-democracy people in the opposition to the public good sure know this, that's why they keep doing huge documents laying out strategies like Project 2025 from The Heritage Foundation, and they have no hesitation in encouraging supporters to engage in electoral politics. Yet there are always propagandists out here trying to convince people there’s some system, their preferred system, that could solve it all so you don’t have to think about it or do civic engagement so much at all.
That’s just not how governance works. If there’s a power vacuum, someone will step into fill that void, and if you care about how that is, there’s no way to set it and forget it.
The Project 2025 document specifically mentioned Sesame Street a few times and cites George Will saying: “If ‘Sesame Street’ programming were put up for auction, the danger would be of getting trampled by the stampede of potential bidders.” and a footnote references The Washington Post, June 2, 2017. They had dollar signs in their eyes. The conservatives always want to privatize the profits of publicly developed goods. And I think right-wing propaganda or at least the suppression of pluralism is likely under even more private controls, considering they outright admit that they believe that PBS does "liberal indoctrination", since Accusation in a Mirror is their MO, we can certainly imagine that their complaint in the Project 2025 document that "PBS and NPR do not even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives." will mean that there are interests that want to change that with privatization. The conservatives truly believe they can buy indoctrination. They have no understanding that the reason Sesame Street is popular is because it is pluralistic and doesn't push exclusivity of a particular religion or worldview, for example.
The right-wing isn’t wrong about education and public sentiment potentially driving politics. The problem is that hasn’t been the case, at least not in the last few decades.