It was bound to happen eventually.
Daniel Tiger has become political. The childhood shows we all knew and loved have been caught up in the partisan bedlam of our current day and age. How we got here is a mystery, but what we must do now has never been clearer.
Because of the persistent push from the Trump administration, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), has been closed. This action has seriously endangered childhood classics like Daniel Tiger and Sesame Street, as well as extensive educational resources meant for K-12 classrooms.
And Republicans across the nation have wasted no time in promoting their new, preferred alternative to the educational programming of PBS. The White House has established the right-leaning educational video platform PragerU as a new educational partner. As one element of this partnership, the White House has featured a new “Founders Museum” displaying AI-generated videos of founding fathers.
The museum features videos of such things as an AI-personified John Adams repeating the right-wing mantra “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Daniel Tiger would disapprove. PragerU’s other videos involve figures like Christopher Columbus telling us, “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?”
Platforms like PragerU simply cannot fill the void left by the departure of PBS. But they are representative of the content that might attempt to: artificial, inauthentic, partisan attempts at imparting a forced perspective to the youngest among us who can’t form our own. And these attempts would not be limited to either end of the political spectrum.
As PragerU has quite deftly demonstrated, there is no longer any barrier to entry in the world of short-form political messaging aimed at young and malleable minds. It’s now as simple as plugging a prompt into generative AI and posting it to a social media feed. With the public media we once knew gone, the most radical and unpleasant elements of our world are free to try their hand at influencing the next generation.
What happens if the next Skibidi Toilet contains subliminal messages from the Chinese Communist Party? What happens when brainrot becomes racist or antisemitic? These possibilities may seem far-fetched, but with extremist and brainrot content flourishing simultaneously in the absence of public media, who knows what could fester in the depths?
Public media has been historically reliable, and because social media content has a lower barrier of entry, it is more vulnerable to extreme content.
It’s easy to question how we got here. Was Daniel Tiger too woke? Was Clifford too red? Was Cookie Monster too blue? But doing so will not help to remedy the onslaught of partisan forces upon childhood education.
In the absence of the programs we once counted on, we must not submit to the mindless drivel that promises to replace the dear relics of our childhood should we do nothing. The death of PBS foreshadows something rotten for the future of the next generation, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
In a world where even children’s television has become politicized, students must take ownership of their own education. Media literacy has never been more important, and Haven students are uniquely well-positioned to retain their marbles in this messy age.
Not only are there public libraries across the district, Haven has its own library where students can do their own research instead of submitting to passive consumption. And it is in that same library where freshman classes are instructed on media literacy.
Perhaps the time has come for the retirement of groans at the mandatory voyages to the library and instead an adoption of an independent understanding of today’s world.
Daniel Tiger was murdered. For many students, it’s hard to know what to trust anymore, but learning how to actively question what we consume has never been more important.
The unsigned editorial represents the consensus opinion of the Editorial Board, which consists of the student editors listed on this page.
