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"As a nonprofit organization which has a long history of building public and private partnerships, Sesame Workshop has benefited from the generous support of CPB [the Corporation for Public Broadcasting], which most recently provided critical grant support for literacy programs for 6-9 year olds, like The Electric Company," Knell said in a statement released Feb. 15, 2011. "CPB has helped support our work with military families to provide social and emotional coping skills for children of parents serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who have left family behind during deployment. It also has provided important funding for our work helping parents who have lost jobs or been displaced due to the economic recession to keep their families intact and positively motivated. Additionally, CPB has been active in helping transition video content into digital assets to be used in schools and distributed through web-based applications nationwide."

With federal funding an annual and often highly political battle, Sesame Workshop and many other companies that get support from the CPB have tried to become increasingly less reliant on government support.

According to a fact-sheet provided by Sesame Workshop, revenues from sales of its products "offset about two-thirds of the research and production costs associated with the Workshop’s educational programs. The remaining one third comes from a combination of philanthropic support, corporate sponsorship and government funding."

"As a result of this financial revenue model," the fact-sheet says, "we are able to deliver each new season of Sesame Street to PBS with more than 93 percent of production costs covered by licensing activities or corporate sponsorships. In 2010, Sesame Workshop had total operating revenues of $136.4 million and total operating expenses of $136.5 million."

Under different circumstances, Republicans might be cheering Sesame Street for making money "the good old-fashioned way" through merchandise sales instead of relying as heavily on federal handouts, said Steve Behrens, editor of Current, a newspaper and website about public media in the United States. Now, he said, that success is being used against it. It's so successful, the argument goes, it doesn't need the government's help.
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