The many tributes marking the death last month of Lloyd Morrisett, co-creator of Sesame Street and Children’s Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop), have typically portrayed him as the philanthropic equivalent of Don Larsen — the New York Yankee famous for pitching a single perfect World Series game and, well, not much else.
But there’s far more to Morrisett’s legacy than Big Bird.
As president of the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation from 1969 to 1998, Morrisett took on a challenge few foundations had ever dared: harnessing the vast power of mass media in all its forms — television, radio, film, newspapers, and eventually, computers — to educate and entertain on a previously unimaginable scale. His ultimate goal: a more informed, inclusive, and civically engaged citizenry.
It was an often lonely and at times quixotic quest, even for someone who at age 39 had already achieved one of philanthropy’s most enduring successes with the launch of Sesame Street. As the field considers Morrisett’s legacy, this precocious achievement has overshadowed his subsequent accomplishments in a long-neglected area of philanthropy — communications and mass media.
More than a half century later, those cumulative efforts have left an enduring mark on how mass media is experienced: what programs and ads children see on TV, how the young and old access computer technology, and how the news media is held accountable for accuracy and fairness.
Lloyd and I met in 1997 as he was preparing to retire as Markle’s president and was looking for someone to write a critical history of the foundation. I told him I was eager for the assignment, but only if it was a warts-and-all account. To my surprise, Morrisett didn’t flinch. He readily agreed to my conditions of full editorial freedom, unrestricted access to foundation documents and archives, and sole copyright for the final product.
His acceptance of those terms without hesitation was my first inkling of what grantees I interviewed would repeatedly tell me about Lloyd’s leadership style: his integrity, his reverence for the value of objective research, his willingness to take extraordinary risk to achieve his goals, and his unwavering backing of Markle’s grantees.
Reinventing a Mission
The communications work Morrisett had in mind upon taking the helm at Markle would require a complete reinvention of the foundation’s rather unremarkable mission at the time: providing scholarships to promising medical-school faculty. The majority of Markle’s board supported Morrisett’s vision but were also initially stunned by his proposal to shift the foundation’s entire focus toward communications and media policy. Few foundations, especially modest-sized ones such as Markle, had ever considered mass media fertile or friendly territory for grant making. As Morrisett himself realized, the obstacles were formidable.
“Among the great socializing, educational and moral forces in society, mass communications is alone in being based on commercial profit-making,” he told Markle’s board early in his presidency. Furthermore, the scarcity of nonprofits in the corporate-dominated communications field meant Morrisett would literally have to create from scratch many of Markle’s funding partners to carry out its initiatives.
Despite the odds, Morrisett recognized that the communications field was entering an unprecedented era of change that could open opportunities for advancing his social and educational goals. As the 1970s dawned, public television was still in its infancy. Cable television was just emerging as a viable alternative to network TV. Communication satellites were being launched. AT&T’s longstanding telecommunications monopoly was about to be challenged. And in a few years, computers would become as common in homes as toasters and dishwashers.
In that setting, Markle’s communications initiatives would be driven by four basic goals, which continue to resonate today:
- Expand access to ensure people of all backgrounds can use media to express their beliefs.
- Promote equity so all can share in the benefits of communications and information systems.
- Guarantee information reaches the public without censorship or needless regulation.
- Lift program quality to enrich as well as entertain.
Morrisett would never quite match the epic success of Sesame Street. Misses were at least as common as hits among the more than 1,000 grants Markle provided under his presidency. But a sampling of the work he led at Markle shows Morrisett’s legacy reaches far beyond the single success of Sesame Street.
Beginning in 1971, Markle provided grants totaling more than $800,000 to Action for Children’s Television, or ACT, founded by several Newton, Mass., moms who were disgusted by the violence and crass commercialism of children’s TV. One of them, Peggy Charren, soon became the face of change with several headline-making appearances at congressional hearings.
Advocacy Wins
ACT’s crowning achievement was the passage in 1990 of the Children’s Television Act, which limited the number of commercials in children’s TV shows and established rules to improve program content. Charren told me that Morrisett was the only foundation leader who took her seriously when ACT was in its infancy: “Without Markle, there would have been no Action for Children’s Television.”
As cable TV emerged in the 1970s, Morrisett saw an opportunity to remake the often dull, amateurish programming on new local-access channels to enrich and inform citizens. Red Burns, a young adjunct film professor at New York University, also recognized the potential for such programming and received four grants totaling $845,000 from Markle to create the Alternate Media Center at NYU. The center helped New York City become an early pacesetter for producing informative local programming and established a model for enhancing content on local-access cable channels in many other communities.
Media Accountablity
Markle’s attempts to improve news coverage and hold the media more accountable were less successful. On the positive side, the foundation’s grants rescued the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Columbia Journalism Review from near-certain extinction in the 1970s. Both organizations survive today. But Morrisett’s backing of a National News Council, which sought to provide consumers a forum to air grievances with the media, lasted only a decade, brought down by a lack of support from news organizations and the especially vocal opposition of the New York Times.
Even more controversial was Morrisett’s effort during the 1992 presidential election to promote more substantive, issue-oriented TV programming as an antidote to horse-race election coverage. After trying unsuccessfully to engage public television as a partner for that work, he turned to CNN, which was more than happy to accept a $3.5 million grant from Markle to enhance its issue coverage. The grant to a for-profit, commercial network, while not unprecedented, was still highly unorthodox and was roundly criticized by, among others, Bill Kovach, then curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. Kovach said he was “astonished at the use of foundation money” for coverage CNN was more than capable of providing on its own.
Morrisett’s efforts to help seniors connect to computers proved more fruitful. With the rapid spread of home computers in the 1980s, Morrisett was concerned the elderly might find the new devices too forbidding and would miss out on their benefits. In addition to funding considerable research on how best to serve the elderly, Markle provided more than $3 million to establish Seniornet, the brainchild of Mary Furlong, an educator at the University of San Francisco who had gained national media attention by creating computer classes for older students.
Seniornet survives today and since 1986 has provided thousands of older adults with physical and virtual learning centers that offer training, host discussions and online events, and review technologies with older users in mind.
Here’s the point: Just as Ralph Nader made it impossible for automakers to blow off questions about car safety, Lloyd Morrisett’s creation of Sesame Street — along with his achievements during 28 years leading Markle — have made it much harder for the communications industry and its regulators to ignore questions about the impact of mass media on the educational and civic well-being of its consumers.
Yes, we should all be thankful that Morrisett gave us Big Bird. But let’s also recognize his multiple other achievements and their impact on communications and philanthropy.
