Elmo and the gang aren’t going anywhere – for now.
Facing mounting public outcry, the Alabama Educational Television Commission voted without dissent on Tuesday to keep its contract with PBS. The move will keep the popular public television programming that has been a staple in classrooms and homes for decades airing around Alabama at least until July.
A motion raised by commissioner Les Barnett to provide PBS with a required 180-day notice to end the contract also failed due to a lack of a second for the motion – a sign, according to APT chairman Ferris Stephens, that the Commission is not likely to end its partnership with PBS.
The meeting on Tuesday was held in a packed meeting room, where well over 100 people – almost all of them there to support keeping PBS programming – attended. They held signs and wore t-shirts in support of PBS, such as one that read “Elmo is not the enemy of the people.” Other signs also referenced the word “enemy,” an apparent response to Barnett’s comments a couple of weeks ago that PBS had made itself “the enemy of what I stand for.”
The upheaval over PBS programming on APT is part of a larger, more troubling movement by the Trump administration to inject partisan politics into every public institution in America. Trump cut funding from the federal budget that supported PBS, calling it a “liberal” organization, because he was angry that the outlet’s news operation continued to provide factual, sound reporting on a variety of topics related to his administration and often exposed Trump for his many, many outright lies.
In retaliation, and because his partymates have refused to stand up to his often-illegal or unconstitutional acts, Trump pushed a defunding effort in a quest to stifle a free press and, as aspiring authoritarian leaders often do, control the flow of information to the people.
The attack on PBS was welcomed by conservatives, who have long sought to end public funding for educational television because an educated populace is detrimental to the long-term viability of their beliefs.
That effort has trickled down to the states, where boards that have been taken over by zealots are searching for ways to boot PBS and insert other programming that typically contains religious propaganda or politically biased material. Alabama’s commission, for example, has made several attempts to air “historical” programming that sought to inject a religious theme into historical stories, such as the founding of America.
What they have found, however, is that the majority of Alabamians are soundly in favor of keeping PBS programming and that the expense of switching from PBS to another source would be extremely costly. It would cost more than $3.5 million just to make the change, and those costs would grow significantly when memberships were canceled and donations dried up in response.
On Monday, Gov. Kay Ivey, apparently alarmed by the outpouring of support for PBS and the anger over the possibility of the programming being dropped, encouraged the Commission to reconsider and make sure that it had a viable plan in place before committing to such a change.
Still, Commissioner Pete Conroy, a supporter of PBS programming, told the AP that Tuesday’s vote was not the end of the issue, and he encouraged the normal people of Alabama to remain vigilant.
