Expect radical right to continue fighting Big Bird and other formidable foes

Idaho Public Television’s annual request for state funding went to the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee last week, and if past is prelude, Big Bird and Judy Woodruff are in for another bumpy ride.

For those living in a cave or glued to the internet, Big Bird is the chief protagonist on Sesame Street, the critically acclaimed program that for decades has taught our kids and grandkids words, numbers and important life skills like kindness, respect, decency and, yes, pluralism and diversity. Woodruff hosts the PBS NewsHour, arguably the most respected and unbiased source of news on the airwaves.

That they or any of the other public television shows and personalities we have come to enjoy and depend on are now being attacked shouldn’t come as a surprise. The radical right’s war hawks in the Statehouse — people like Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, Rep. Ron Nate, Rep. Karey Hanks, Rep. Priscilla Giddings and Rep. Dorothy Moon — have been after them for years.

Hanks attempted to forestall consideration of the 2017 budget bill to fund equipment purchases that took IPTV out of the analog world into the digital world. Nate, Giddings and Moon labored mightily during last year’s session to deny all state funding, claiming IPTV promoted discussions about race and privilege and was biased against ultraconservative Republicans like them. Giddings even came up with the odious idea to tie state funding to controls — presumably her and her cohorts’ controls — on what IPTV could and could not broadcast, apparently forgetting the First Amendment’s prohibition of prior restraint and her own cabal’s hypocrisy about a liberal cancel culture.

I can only imagine this year’s debate in light of the NewsHour’s detailed and provocative reporting about the many challenges and ills we face these days, including the rank partisanship that has oozed out of Washington and is now infecting our own efforts at enlightened self-governance here in Idaho.

All of them should know better, particularly Nate, a Brigham Young University-Idaho economics professor whose ideas about public education — he and his acolytes in the Statehouse are apparently against it — are more about telling our kids what to think and less about instructing them how to think.

Idaho Public Television doesn’t exist to indoctrinate beliefs or threaten anyone’s way of life. It exists to bring us knowledge, facts, beauty and wonder — essential commodities to better understand and navigate the complicated world we live in. Ensuring its survival with state funding is critical to who we are and what we hope to be.

If Hanks, Nate, Giddings, Moon and the misguided misanthropes who agree with them can’t understand this, they should be consigned to the garbage can with Oscar the Grouch.