Whitewashing Pedophilia at PBS
Another victim has come forward and accused the voice of Sesame Street’s Elmo of engaging in pedophilia. Kevin Clash, the 28-year voice of Elmo, has resigned from the show after another alleged victim has come forward, this time in court. Cecil Singleton has sued Clash for engaging in sexual conduct with the boy when he was 15. Singleton is the second victim to come forward.
The reaction of the government-funded PBS’s Sesame Workshop? Condemnation? Disgust? Hardly.
The statement:
“Sesame Workshop’s mission is to harness the educational power of media to help all children the world over reach their highest potential. Kevin Clash has helped us achieve that mission for 28 years, and none of us, especially Kevin, want anything to divert our attention from our focus on serving as a leading educational organization. Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding Kevin’s personal life has become a distraction that none of us want, and he has concluded that he can no longer be effective in his job and has resigned from Sesame Street. This is a sad day for Sesame Street.”
(outrageous emphasis all mine.)
Let’s deconstruct the statement. First the praise: “Kevin Clash has helped us achieve that mission for 28 years.” Really? What will PBS do when we learn that Clash’s access to children through Sesame Workshop may have resulted in abuse the same way Jerry Sandusky’s access to kids at Penn State did? Will PBS stand by Clash the same way the statement does?
Pedophiles notoriously enter professions that give them access to children. Like a fisherman with a lure, they rely on puppets, football tickets, candy, balloons, toys and worse to attract victims. Did Clash’s “achievement” of the PBS “mission for 28 years” have a darker side? It seems strange that his employers would tout his good work.
Next: “none of us, especially Kevin, want anything to divert our attention.” So nice to see that Sesame Workshop is doing Clash’s bidding. If Kevin wouldn’t want it, neither would we.
Sickening.
More:
“the controversy surrounding Kevin’s personal life has become a distraction that none of us want.”
The “controversy?” “Personal life?” Let’s call it what it really is: criminal allegations of child rape. It isn’t personal, unless you are a member of NAMBLA, when an adult engages in sex with a minor boy. It is public. It is against the law.
Nor is it a “controversy.” It is a crime.
Is this the world the supporters of government-funded broadcast media want? Do they really want a world where criminal pedophiles are excused because of their good work for 28 years? Is anything that involves alleged crimes by gay pedophiles an intrusion into someone’s “personal life?”
It seems so.
Even late today, the accused pedophile Clash is featured prominently on the Sesame Workshop webpage. The front page has this graphic containing Clash’s photo.
The photo links to this page that says:
Congratulations to the Sesame Workshop team for receiving an Emmy for Growing Hope Against Hunger, a special focusing on the invisible crisis of food insecurity in the United States. Food insecurity is a difficult issue for parents and children to discuss, and Growing Hope Against Hunger sought to present personal stories about food insecure families that would help raise awareness about hunger as well strategies that have helped these families grow stronger and more secure. Congratulations to . . . Producer Kevin Clash.
Here’s what PBS should say instead:
We are disgusted by the allegations against Kevin Clash. We at PBS take our responsibility as a publicly supported corporation seriously. Child sexual abuse is a tragic crime and will never be tolerated. Unfortunately, Mr. Clash was placed in a position where he had access to children as the voice of Elmo and that cannot continue. We know that pedophilia is a crime that affects lives well into adulthood and we will do all we can to help any victims.
That’s the only reaction America should tolerate from PBS. After all, we pay the bills.
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This response from PBS (or lack of) infuriates me. I look at what the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts go through to protect the kids in their schools and programs and they get vilified for being homophobic and discriminatory. PBS (and BBC) get a pass. PBS and BBC should get the same treatment and vilification Pen State just received. Giant double standard.
Take the Press release I quote in the article. Substitute Catholic Diocese, Church, Priest, etc, and imagine the reaction that would follow. Big difference. The Catholic Church in 2012 never would. Apparently to publicly funded broadcasting groups like Sesame Street (and the BBC), there is a different standard.
not to mention the everyday public schools. reports show its much more prevalent there but…we never hear about it.
THIS IS A STALKER AND NOT ROBERT THE OWNERS OF THIS SITE ARE MORONS AND HAVE NO CONTROL OVER THE RUBBISH THAT THEY ACCEPT TO BE PRINTED
This is beat up media sensationlism to increase viewing figures and ratings, rather than genuine indepth analysis of how pedophiles can be supported and helped. The media is only interested in beating the public into a frenzy and encouraging them to call for blood. Years ago the answer was to warn kids of Mr so and so, and “if” anything happened a big issue was NOT made of it, and the kids soon forgot about it. These days everything is blown out of all proportion, and the kids are more traumatised by their parents making a big issue of it and getting the police involved and going to court, than the actual pedophile event itself. There is a very wise old saying “Least said, soonest mended”, which use to be the maxim when I was a kid.
Did NAMBLA cross post my article??
THIS IS A STALKER AND NOT J CHRISTIAN ADAMS THE OWNERS OF THIS SITE ARE MORONS AND HAVE NO CONTROL OVER THE RUBBISH THAT THEY ACCEPT TO BE PRINTED
ever been molested?
get back to me when you have.
Actually I sense he is an offender.
Note that a New York Times law expert (who does gender and sexuality at Columbia Law School, where doing sexuality is now a major) is calling the case “sex panic.”
For those readers who did not major in Women’s Studies, “sex panic” is the historiographical term for stuff that professors of sexuality dream up between filing paperwork to change their genders. In one extremely efficient sentence, she manages to accuse young gay men of homophobia and demean Mrs. Petraeus, if the latter feels her husband’s whoring around was anything other than sex-positive:
“Katherine Franke, a professor of law and the director of the center for gender and sexuality law at Columbia University, said she worried that Mr. Clash was “’the most recent victim of what we call in my world a ‘sex panic.’ ‘ She named a second recent example, David Petraeus, who admitted having an extramarital affair and resigned as the C.I.A. director earlier this month.
“’At precisely the moment when gay people’s right to marry seems to be reaching a positive tipping point, sexuality is being driven back into the closet as something shameful and incompatible with honor (in the case of Petraeus) or decency (as in the case of Clash),’ Ms. Franke said in an e-mail message. Mr. Clash, she added, ‘has not been convicted of a crime, but merely accused of one in a completely unsubstantiated, vague complaint.’”
@ Graham Woodruffe Mullaloo, I suggest you look at yourself in the mirror graham woodruffe, as you contemplate just how many lives are ruined by just one pedophile.
THIS IS THE WORK OF AN ONLINE STALKER AND HE USES THIS NAME TO DISCREDIT THE PERSON WHO OWNS IT. AND YOU PEOPLE PRINT THIS GARBAGE….GET A LIFE AND GET SOME CONTROL OF YOUR SITE BEFORE YOU GET SUED FOR SLANDER AND DEFAMATION
THIS IS A STALKER AND NOT GRAHAM WOODRUFFE THE OWNERS OF THIS SITE ARE MORONS AND HAVE NO CONTROL OVER THE RUBBISH THAT THEY ACCEPT TO BE PRINTED.
@ SOMEONE WHO KNOWS,
Calm down love before you have a brain aneurysm
cyber nut,
you sound like another
and stop SHOUTING, everybody is deaf & nobody is listening to you
Back peddling is going to be part of the modus operandii for internet trolls this year…I am quietly watching and waiting
@ some who has you in a corner – I think you mean Modus operandi not “modus operandii”
And as for “Back peddling” be careful, its easy to change gear, if thats what you want?
I predict you will be in your corner cul-de-sac quietly seething and waiting for many years to come.
Shall we begin again?
…to help the pedophile??? They do fine on their own. The issue is to protect against them. If I recall correctly, they have the highest recidivism rate of all criminals. Like my cop friend says, even junkies SOMETIMES get clean and sober and stay that way. Not so child molesters. PBS blew it in a major way.
Patty is not making these posts, Patty is being stalked online by a disgusting brainless predator who is trying to ruin Patty’s life by posting purile and clearly offensive paedophile related material.How sick is that.Don’t bother writing to Patty, Patty did not post the material and never reads most of it, it does go elsewhere though where it is being correlated.
Its a sick sick world when you can’t even let your kids watch Sesame Street in case Elmo is a pedo.
Mo Kansas is not making these posts, he is being stalked online by a disgusting brainless predator who is trying to ruin his life by posting purile and clearly offensive paedophile related material.How sick is that.Don’t bother writing to Mo Kansas, he did not post the material and never reads most of it, it does go elsewhere though where it is being correlated.