How Programs Like PBS & Sesame Street Are Essential to Free Information and Education
Public Broadcasting and Sesame Street – A Paradise Commons of the Airwaves
"Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can captivate children, you can educate them."
— Malcolm Gladwell, describing the vision of Joan Ganz Cooney
Connection to the Charter
When Sesame Street launched in 1969, it did something radical: it used the mass medium of television to deliver high-quality, research-backed early education directly into the homes of poor and working-class families, free of charge. PBS and NPR remain among the last public goods in an otherwise privatized media landscape.
Article IV (The Paradise Commons) names "public libraries and tool-lending libraries, providing free access to knowledge." Public broadcasting is the digital equivalent, a shared commons that refuses to turn education into a commodity. Defending PBS and expanding public media funding is a legitimate, winnable political target for our movement.
When we fight for free, universal broadband and well-funded public media, we are building the information infrastructure of paradise.