Muppet Diplomacy: An Interview with Gary Knell, CEO of Sesame WorkshopBy Alice Baumgartner (Yale)April 2007 The greatest diplomat to preschoolers across the world is neither Nelson Mandela nor Kofi Annan, but a troupe of green grouches and tall yellow birds who live on Sesame Street. From encouraging female literacy in Egypt to raising awareness about HIV/AIDS in South Africa, the Muppets have helped children in 120 countries learn the value of numeracy and literacy, tolerance and respect. The founding father of this so-called ‘Muppet diplomacy’ is Gary Knell, the president and chief executive officer of Sesame Workshop. Under his direction, Sesame Street’s co-productions have impacted more kids in more countries than any other children’s program in the history of television. Knell spoke to a gathering of students at Yale University on Apr. 5, 2007, and the following is a selection of questions and answers from the talk.
How was Sesame Street founded?
It started with a research paper way back in the Stone Age of 1966, where our founder Joan Ganz Cooney, who was a television producer, cooked this up at a dinner party with Lloyd Morriset who was then at the Carnegie Corporation in New York. They came up with the idea of producing a television program that teaches school readiness rather than advertising jingles. They knew that children were glued to the television. Much of it was mind-numbing commercials that children were memorizing. I think our founder felt that we could use this magnetic appeal.
As we look to the future now, we face a very different world. Today, it’s not just about television or books. Children are learning on a variety of media, and we view that television isn’t going away or that television is going everywhere. Back in the 1960s, the integrated cast of Sesame Street was revolutionary. It was actually banned in Mississippi. It was the first program to have a Hispanic family and African American parents. It’s about humanizing the other side. We’ve taken that onto the global platform because we believe that children are not born to hate, and it is much harder to hate someone when you know someone on that other side.
Reaching out globally must be a challenge culturally. How do you choose topics with cultural understanding?
That’s the biggest challenge we have. We enter into these countries saying “we are not here to sell Big Bird to Belfast.” We hold a content-seminar where we bring in teachers, childcare experts, and the Ministry of Education who come in and design a curriculum. Some of these people get into wicked debates. For example, what should we teach our pre-schoolers? This is not about trying to promote Elmo and a curriculum from the U.S. If it comes across as an American show, we will have failed. It’s not the Washington approach—we don’t bomb them first. . .
We try, believe it or not, not to let politics drive decisions. It’s really about bringing in child development experts. You have to remember that this is a show for preschoolers, so there are a lot of issues about child development that kids at that age can’t really comprehend in a clear way. Someone brought up the topic of racial discrimination. We’re not going to tackle racial discrimination except in a way of showing racial diversity. So it’s a way of showing a neighborhood that’s filled with different kinds of people, or Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. We have a set of curricular experts who we work with, whether it’s in the U.S. or in South Africa or in Northern Ireland, where they really build a curriculum of the most important topics. In the United States, child obesity is a huge issue. In South Africa, it’s about HIV/AIDS, where you have pediatric AIDS and one in nine kids are being affected. You’ve got to start dealing with those sorts of issues.
How do you compete with other children’s shows?
We live in a world now that’s dominated by these major media conglomerates—Disney, Viacom, Time Warner. We have to compete against them on a certain score. I try to get our organization back to its roots and remember why we’re here, which is really about filling children’s needs, and the minute we stop doing that we should go out of business.
We know that Nickelodeon is not going to go into Bangladesh, because they are not going to make any money. They are not going to deal with HIV/AIDS in South Africa, whereas we will take on Kosovo and actually deal with Albanians and send producers in. It’s really about Muppet diplomacy.
What do you see as the key responsibilities of your job, and what do you do on a day to day basis?
Other than ‘Potty Time Elmo’? My job goes from dealing with the politics of the Iranian Parliament to Betty Crocker food snacks. It’s kind of a wide variety of issues. I get judged by how I run an organization with about 350 people, and we’re judged quantitatively and qualitatively. Just as Yale University or the Metropolitan Opera or a museum, we’ve got to make enough revenues for the organization to pay the staff, to pay for the production, to pay Kevin Clash to produce a music video with Elmo and Chris Brown. We have to generate enough revenues from philanthropy, corporate sponsors, or licensed products, where we receive royalty from all those books and videos you have in your closet at home. There are also qualitative standards: Are we making an impact? Kami [the HIV-positive Muppet introduced in Africa] has had a real impact on HIV/AIDS. Cookie Monster doing his thing with vegetables is making an impact. It’s changing the dynamic.
Frankly our job is about breaking through the clutter. Sesame Street, when you guys were born, was one of two pre-school shows in the US. Now there are 50 on TV, on six competing networks that are all aimed to pre-schoolers. We’ve got to have stuff that’s going to engage kids. I like to say that our boss is the four-year-old girl in New Jersey who has a remote control in her hand. That’s who we have to answer to.
Where did the name ‘Sesame Street’ come from?
It comes from 'Open Sesame'—it’s a way of opening up television to educating kids. |
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