Mitt Romney’s comment over Big Bird ignites the Internet, social media
In last night’s first presidential debate, GOP nominee Mitt Romney made the claim that despite his fondness for the affable yellow bird, Big Bird, he intended to cut the subsidy given to PBS as part of his plan to curb government spending.
PBS
“I’m sorry Jim. I’m gonna stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m gonna stop other things,” Romney said. “I like PBS, I like Big Bird, I actually like you too.”
At that point, someone in the Twitterverse responded by creating a @FiredBigBird account, which, as of this writing shortly after 10 p.m. ET Wednesday, had almost 9,900 followers.
Tweets followed.
“I worked with Big Bird. I served with Big Bird. You, sir, are no Big Bird,” The Lance Arthur, @thelancearthur, of San Francisco tweeted.
“Why is there no Muppet-vision way to watch the #debate?” tweeted Ryan Penagos of New York City, also known as @Agent.M, executive editorial director of Marvel Digital Media Group and Marvel.com.
“Big Bird, you have two minutes for rebuttal,” tweeted Ina Fried, @inafried, of San Francisco, the senior editor for a website called All Things Digital.
And Rick Klein, senior Washington editor at ABC, tweeted that Big Bird had no comment and “does not understand why he’s in the news.” Klein added, “I’m actually not making this up.”
According to Sherrie Westin, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of the Sesame Workshop, Big Bird’s life is not in danger.
She joined Soledad O’Brien on CNN this morning to talk the masses off the ledge:
“Sesame Workshop receives very, very little funding from PBS. So, we are able to raise our funding through philanthropic, through our licensed product, which goes back into the educational programming, through corporate underwriting and sponsorship. So quite frankly, you can debate whether or not there should be funding of public broadcasting. But when they always try to tout out Big Bird, and say we’re going to kill Big Bird—that is actually misleading, because Sesame Street will be here.”
