Where have you gone, Elmo, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird?
In a more innocent time, the hallowed puppets of Sesame Street were recurring characters in congressional debates about public broadcasting. They served a vital and somewhat quaint Kabuki function: Whenever a politician questioned whether PBS or NPR should continue to receive government funding, public broadcast advocates predictably trotted out their furry or feathered friends to disarm the bullies and remind everyone how beloved these iconic creatures are. Especially by kids. Remember the kids!
Sadly, Messrs. Elmo, Monster, and Bird were nowhere to be seen on Capitol Hill today. They would not have fit in, anyway, as the proceedings in a crowded basement-level hearing room of the Capitol Visitor Center were not sweet, accepting, or the least bit neighborly.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, had invited the head of PBS, Paula Kerger, and of NPR, Katherine Maher, to testify before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE). As chair of the subcommittee, Greene had many questions. And, it would seem, pre-existing impressions: The hearing was titled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.” (The Atlantic has a partnership with WETA, which receives funding from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)
Greene gaveled the proceeding to order at 10 a.m. “Today, we are looking at the more than half a billion dollars federal taxpayers spend annually to fund public radio and television,” she said in her opening statement. She vowed to grill the witnesses about their oversight of “radical left-wing echo-chambers,” and accused the CEOs of perpetrating a “communist agenda” and being fine with “sexualizing and grooming children.”
This seemed hostile.
It was not really surprising, though. In her brief time in Congress, Greene has proved a relentless voice of MAGA grievance and one-woman Masterpiece Theatre in reacting to the latest outrage visited upon Donald Trump. Her newly created DOGE subcommittee fashions itself as a corollary to the efforts of Elon Musk in his quest to identify and slash or eliminate whatever government work and workers he deems unworthy.
The panel quickly fell into a familiar pattern of Republicans and Democrats taking turns giving five-minute speeches, nominally framed as questions for the witnesses. Representative Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat, devoted most of his statement to railing against the subcommittee’s priorities. He believed that it should not be using its power to “go after the likes of Elmo and Cookie Monster,” but should be more concerned with getting to the bottom of why high-level officials in the Trump administration texted sensitive national-security material to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of this magazine (a big story this week, apparently). “If shame was still a thing, this hearing would be shameful,” Lynch said.
James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said that he used to listen to NPR while working on a farm during his rural Kentucky youth. He spoke with a measure of nostalgic fondness for the outlet, until his inevitable pivot. “I don’t even recognize NPR anymore,” lamented Comer, who now dismisses the outlet as “propaganda.”
Even if the Sesame Street characters were not physically present, Democrats were eager to apply the show’s recurring bits to Trump’s conduct in the White House. “To borrow a phrase from Sesame Street, the letter of the day is ‘C’—for corruption,” Greg Casar, of Texas, said. “Leave Elmo alone!” he pleaded.
Robert Garcia, a Democrat from California, had pointed questions for Kerger, of PBS. He wanted to know whether Elmo’s ruddy complexion signaled some troubling political sympathies. “Is Elmo now or has he ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?” he asked. Garcia also wanted to know if Bert and Ernie had an extremist liberal agenda. He appeared to be kidding.
The spectacle lasted a few hours and was mostly forgettable. But it illustrated how another entrenched (and somewhat goofy) Washington tradition—wrangling over whether to defund public broadcasting—has devolved into cheap and predictable posturing. Theoretically, it should be possible to hold a perfectly legitimate debate over whether public money should subsidize radio and TV outlets—and to do it without the chair of the subcommittee accusing PBS of being “one of the founders of the trans child abuse industry.”
Alas, this was not to be today. The hearing room emptied out around lunchtime, and that was it for conducting the nation’s business.
This article was brought to you by the latter “D”—for depressing.
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