Sesame Workshop will "downsize significantly" announced president and CEO Sherrie Rollins Westin on Wednesday in a note to staff.
The layoffs come about two months after Max said it would stop distributing Sesame Street episodes after 2025 and within a day after more than 200 of its employees asked for Sesame Workshop to recognize that they want to form a union. Cast -- like puppeteers -- crew and writers are already unionized, said a statement from OPEIU Local 153.
"Amid the changing media and funding landscape, we have made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our organization," a Sesame Workshop spokesperson wrote in an email to NPR.
Last December, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns Max, announced that, after 10 years, it was not renewing its deal to fund new episodes of the iconic children's series. At the time, the corporation said its priorities had shifted and that Sesame Street was "not as core to our strategy."
You're not going to believe this, but CNN recently lied in a "fact" check.
Wait, CNN lied?
Brrrrcccrrrsssshhh. Mind exploding.
This is standard leftwing "fact" checking. They begin from the conclusion that Republicans are lying because, you know, we Republicans just always lie, and then they search for arguments and tendentious readings of statements to find a pretext to claim it's false.
Meanwhile, on the rare occasions they "fact" check egregious Democrat lies, they start with the opposite conclusion, that Democrats are telling the truth because Democrats are literally made of truth and holy righteousness, and seek out convoluted readings of Democrat lies that can be argued to be "true" from, as Obi-Wan said, "from a certain point of view."
Daily Caller News Foundation:
CNN issued a correction after the network inaccurately asserted that President Donald Trump "falsely claimed" the Biden administration spent $8 million to make mice transgender.
During his joint address to Congress on Tuesday, Trump cited several examples of "appalling waste" he had cut, including $8.2 million in NIH-funded studies on "gender-affirming" hormone treatments mice. CNN's Deidre McPhillips initially tried to dispute the claim, arguing only about $500,000 had been allocated for similar research in monkeys -- she was later forced to issue a correction after the White House proved CNN's "fact check" inaccurate in a statement.
"Last night, President Donald J. Trump highlighted many of the egregious examples of waste, fraud and abuse funded by the American taxpayers, including $8 million spent by the Biden Administration 'for making mice transgender,'" the White House statement reads. "The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual)."
"Trump falsely claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency identified government spending of '$8 million for making mice transgender,'" CNN's original fact check read.
The White House then released a statement listing six NIH grants for studies on hormone treatments in mice, a combined total of $8,290,053. The Biden-era grants included $455,000 to study "gender-affirming hormone therapy on HIV-vaccine induced immune responses, $2.5 million to study the reproductive consequences of hormone therapy, $299,940 to study testosterone therapy on breast cancer risk and treatment outcomes, $735,113 to study the effects of hormone therapy on mouse microbiomes, $1.2 million to study "androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis" and $3.1 million to study hormones as mediators of sex influences in asthma. All listed studies involved hormonal replacement in mice.
CNN's initial fact check Wednesday morning focused narrowly on three NIH studies. One focused on a $299,940 grant from the National Cancer Institute seeking "to compare breast cancer rates among female mice and those receiving testosterone therapy." Two others from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases totaling $455,120 focused on how "an HIV vaccine worked in mice that had received cross-sex hormone therapy."
The outlet later updated its page, changing "Trump falsely claimed" to "This claim needs context." The outlet also explicitly acknowledged its earlier error, writing "An earlier version of this item incorrectly characterized as false Trump's claim about federal money being spent for 'making mice transgender.'"
"The White House list made clear what Trump, in the speech, did not: The studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them, not for the purpose of making mice transgender," McPhillips wrote, adding "context" to the initially false article.
Bonus:
Another bonus: