One of America’s most popular and influential exports isn’t a product that comes in bottle, on a Hollywood movie reel or in a shipping crate.

The product, or its international equivalent, is a daily presence in more than 140 counties covering close to three-fourths of the human-populated planet.  But it could disappear from Warren County. And most of America.

Since its debut in 1969 on the nationwide Public Broadcasting System, Sesame Street has been regularly viewed by more than 86 million children. The daily program entertains and educates pre-schoolers, teaching the letters of the alphabet, their sounds and how words are put together. With puppet characters such as the Count, 3- and 4-year-olds are introduced to numbers and the number system.

But the Count and his Sesame Street neighbors like Bert and Ernie, the furry Cookie Monster, the yellow-feathered Big Bird and the green contrarian Oscar the Grouch are facing an uncertain future after a Congressional panel voted last July to cancel all taxpayer funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

WCTE-PBS is a non-commercial, non-profit broadcaster that has been serving Tennessee’s Upper Cumberland region, including Warren County, for more than 46 years. As a regional outlet for PBS programming like Sesame Street, the station serves 1.2 million viewers in a deeply rural, mostly low-income area.

Governed by a community-based, unpaid board of trustees, WCTE operates with a bare bones mix of 70% CPB and state funding, with the remaining 30% coming from voluntary donations from the public and from local business underwriters.

Warren County’s Larry Flatt, director of Motlow State Community College’s Automation and Robotics Training Center in McMinnville, is one of the latest additions to the public-interest station’s board. 

Last July 14, the US House Appropriations Education Subcommittee voted to cut off funding for CPB by 2026.  The Republican-controlled panel zeroed out, among other proposed allocations, $575 million for the umbrella agency’s 2026 appropriation.

“Stations serving rural communities could even go off the air,” WCTE President and CEO Avery Hutchins told the Rotary Club of McMinnville at its weekly luncheon Thursday at First Presbyterian Church.

Daytime programming from PBS provides education and entertainment for children, while the nightly prime time caters to adults. The evening news magazine, covering national and international events, starts at 6 p.m. locally, followed by historical documentaries including the celebrated Ken Burns series, investigative reporting and professional analysis, high-quality dramatic and cultural programs and science shows such as the long-running, multi-award-winning Nova. 

All of that, plus instantaneous public emergency alerts like tornado warnings, in on the chopping block if Congress agrees to the cancellation of CPB funding.

So is public broadcasting’s funding a significant issue in cutting government spending?

“Your financial investment is $1.60 per person per year,” Hutchins told the Rotarians. “That amounts to 0.01% of the federal budget,” she noted. 

“PBS has been No. 1 in public trust for 21 years,” the Rotary speaker told the club’s luncheon audience. 

Despite its sterling public image and its long history as for award-winning journalism, PBS has faced cycles of political opposition since its creation under the Lyndon B. Johnson presidency in 1967.  But grass-roots support has frustrated repeated rounds of political attacks.

Hutchins, WCTE viewers and fans of public broadcasting in general hope to prevail again, assuring not only the survival but the progress of independent, non-commercial television and radio.

“We need champions in the communities” to advocate, she urged, calling for supporters to contact their elected representatives at the federal and state levels. “Let’s not lose this momentum.”

Hutchins discusses these and related issues when she appears this week on McMinnville Public Radio 91.3-WCPI as guest on the weekly FOCUS program. The half-hour conversation airs Tuesday at 5 p.m. and again Saturday at 9:35 a.m.