Sesame Street doesn’t want to get stuck between Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the team behind the educational show wants President Obama’s campaign to pull an ad featuring Big Bird. The ad was released after Mitt Romney last week said he “loves Big Bird,” but would like to pull PBS funding from the federal budget. (Also after Big Bird appeared on Saturday Night Live.) WSJ describes the ad, which you can see here…
The ad shows images of Bernie Madoff and others implicated in various financial and corporate scandals. A narrator then intones: “And the evil genius who towered over them?”
A silhouette of Big Bird flashes on screen.
“Mitt Romney knows it’s not Wall Street you have to worry about, it’s Sesame Street,” the narrator said.
The ad is airing on national cable and broadcast TV, in time slots devoted to comedy shows, the Obama campaign said.
Sesame Workshop responded by saying it doesn’t “endorse candidates or participate in political campaigns.”
The Center for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund public radio and PBS shows like Sesame Street and NewsHour, currently requests $445 million a year from the federal government. According to Politico, they received $506 million in 2010, or 0.00014 percent of the federal budget.
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