Defenders of public media funding have long invoked the specter of cuts coming for Sesame Street’s cuddly monsters — but now that the Trump administration has slashed funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the chief of the nonprofit behind the show is still confident it will survive.
Sherrie Westin, the CEO of Sesame Workshop, told CEO Editor Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson last week at Semafor’s World Economy Summit that the CPB clawbacks are not an “existential threat,” accounting for a relatively small portion of the nonprofit’s budget. But the partnership with PBS is key, she said, in part because it helps educational children’s programming reach households that can’t afford streaming services like Netflix (with which Sesame Workshop has also recently partnered).
Westin acknowledged the show’s expansion outside of TV, too. Elmo and friends have been building their social media brands for a while now, and Sesame Street’s 28.6 million YouTube subscribers is nothing to scoff at — even if there, it’s competing for youngsters’ attention with the likes of Cocomelon (198 million and counting).