That was one of the things I wanted to talk about because making the case for PBS is important. Do you have any idea what PBS Kids is going to be doing without that federal funding?

Obviously it is going to tough and you will be able to get some grants from other places. But it's not the same thing.

It's not the same, but I would say you're talking to me a year later. And last year I was like, whoa. How is this going to work?

And right now I feel really good about where we are. So I'll just bottom line up front, we're in good shape. And we're going to be okay.

A big piece of it is the public response. I'm sure you've heard that over a million new donors have come into the public media system since the defunding. And many of them are sustainers.

They've signed on to be regular. And we had some donors who stepped up to help pick up things that got cut right before they were going to launch. To help us get over that finish line.

So we've seen a really good uptick. We've also seen a really huge outpouring from families. I mean, we have kids sending in their allowance.

We have kids saying, “Instead of gifts, I had people make donations.” A couple of instances where we know kids did lemonade stands. One kid made shell necklaces and sold them and donated all of it.

There's kind of this groundswell that is being felt by our stations in terms of support. The other thing we had to do is really shift how we do our work. You know, we were rolling out 170 new episodes a year.

And we're doing broadcasts. We're doing streaming. We're doing podcasts.

We're doing games. We had pipelines in place, we had to look across all of that. And what we had to is say “Okay, what is going to be a sustainable number?”

We can't do what we've always done. So right now we've landed at 100. And, then it’s deciding, if we roll that out, how do we confirm that that still works on broadcast?

How do we launch things differently on digital? Drop them a little bit more like streamers do? You know, pace out episodes, new episode rollouts over a longer period of time?

We did a lot of culling. We went back and looked at what can we shed? Everyone has been forever has been saying, “Ooh, it’s the long tail, keep your libraries as long as possible.

And we decided, let's clean it up and focus most where we want people to go. And I think across the board we're seeing that work. We are not seeing our numbers drop on YouTube.

We've actually seen them go up tremendously. And I think part of that is the ways that we're approaching what we're doing for discoverability on that platform now. We just took a really hard look at it and said, “Okay, if we aren't going to have regular funding, what can we do that would help us boost here?”

And I think also a lot of families were worried we were going away and looking for us on that platform. And so we've seen big growth there without drops anywhere else. And that feels fantastic to me.

So it's a long answer to your question and we're still figuring it out. But we've fundamentally changed our model for how we're ordering content, for how we're rolling out content, for how we're working with our production partners, and how we're trying to get things to kids.

Comedian Whitney Cummings said Saturday that she was informed a joke she made about Donald Trump during her performance at the 27th Mark Twain Prize for American Humor would be cut from the program, which is set to premiere on Netflix this Tuesday. During her set, Cummings joked Trump could not attend the event because he "got caught in sex traffic," a not-so-subtle reference to his inclusion in the Epstein Files. Cummings said that she was later informed the joke would not air, though she did not specify who delivered the news to her. "They said, 'We would like to cut it out,'" Cummings recalled on her show. "They said, 'We need to cut it from the broadcast. And I'm like, 'Well, it's already out there. Who cares?' And they're like, 'He will sue you.'"

Spokespeople for Netflix did not comment on Monday evening, despite multiple requests. But it goes without saying that censoring comedians is a bad look for the Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters-led company, especially when it relates to mere jokes about the president of the United States. As Cummings noted, her speech was given at the Mark Twain Prize ceremony. "This is the only time that you shouldn’t get censored because it is about comedians using humor to criticize our elected officials," she said.

Whitney Cummings once said she doesn’t know if the moon landing is real and she doesn’t care. 

Whitney Cummings believes soy milk causes cancer.

Whitney Cummings did not have her infant son vaccinated for Hepatitis B “because you get it from gay sex or dirty needles.”

Whitney Cummings continued: “So it started to be like, hold on, 'We don't believe in gender, but we need a female president.' You're like, hold on. And then it's like, 'My body, my choice, unless it's a baby that needs a vaccine for Hepatitis B,’ which comes from butt sex and sharing needles. And then 'We believe in climate change and sea is rising, but we live on the coast.' Would you buy a house on the beach if you truly believed that the seas are—you know, 'We believe in recycling,' but why can't you give Andrew Yang another shot?”

Whitney Cummings once said she doesn’t know if Helen Keller was blind or not.

Whitney Cummings said in 2020 of her friend Jeff Ross, who allegedly groomed and abused a teenage girl: “As comedians, it’s our job to advertise our flaws. We are scumbags. We admit it. We go onstage, say we’re a scumbag and piece of shit, and then when it’s revealed that we did all those things people get mad at us. So when it comes to minors and rape, that’s never acceptable and never OK, but expecting comedians to be perfect? That’s not what we do. We didn’t sign up for that. That was never our job. We advertise our mistakes.”

“Why are we all afraid to say it?” Cummings asked. “I guess that’s what the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is. It's using humor to call out political leaders, but just to be like, oh yeah, okay. I wouldn't want to hurt the Kennedys’ feelings. You know, God forbid one of the people that helped arrange Marilyn Monroe's puke perfectly so that it looked like an overdose, I wouldn't want them to be offended.”

The AI chatbot also stated that the page would be permanently deleted after 180 days and advised The Bloomingtonian to download its information before deletion.

The enforcement may have affected more than The Bloomingtonian. At least six readers contacted the publication to report that their Facebook accounts were restricted after they shared, commented on or discussed a Bloomingtonian article about the suspension.

One reader reported receiving a 30-day restriction under Facebook’s cybersecurity policy. Another reader reported being suspended after posting about the matter to a community page that regularly shared Bloomingtonian reporting.

Just before 6 p.m. a message suddenly appeared on my personal Facebook account saying:

“After reviewing your appeal, your Page The Bloomingtonian has been published. This means it can now be viewed publicly.”

I also received an email confirming that the page had been republished. I do not know what changed, who reviewed it or what finally caused Facebook to reverse its decision. After more than a week of contradictory notices, automated responses and messages saying the suspension was permanent, the page is public again.

At the very least, we got our followers back.

The bad news is that it appears all 111 of The Bloomingtonian’s paying Facebook subscribers are gone, along with this month’s subscription revenue. The page has also been demonetized, even though another screen says it has no recent monetization violations. Facebook says its “technology” determined that the page violated its Partner Monetization Policies, but it does not identify any specific content or explain what rule was broken.

I don’t now how that will be resolved. As I was posting this, the subscriber tab also disappeared.