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The explicitly anti-racist politics of Sesame Street (and also the Electric Company) have a lot to do with why conservatives turned against PBS in the 1970s and 1980s.
Can't find the citation now, but I remember reading that in the 1st years of the show Sesame Street would test market all of their segments w/ kids from a predominantly African-American public housing unit in NYC. If something didn't resonate with that audience, they scrapped it.
Here's a thread from last year where I talk about how Sesame Street and the Electric Company in the 1970s taught me to imagine the American working class as always multiracial and multiethnic.
In the mid-1970s the FTC seriously considered banning marketing to children under the age of 12. Here's Gary Cross's discussion of this moment in his book All Consuming Century. 
This was right before the explosion of cable TV. Imagine how different our media landscape would look like today if the logic of children's TV was aimed at fostering democratic empathy rather than using cutting edge social scientific research to turn children into avid consumers.
Mister Rogers, Sesame Street, and Electric Company were idealistic efforts to model for children what democratic empathy looked like. Such shows were only viable in a non-commercial, non-profit based setting.
Perhaps the devolution of children's television was inevitable. Who knows. But I think it's pretty clear that turning our nation's children over to advertisers and their armies of psychologists paid to extract money from the new and lucrative "children's market" was not good.
I'm not saying that all children's television made after 1979 was trash...I'm just saying that the early 70's were an interesting interregnum in the history of children's TV, when it came to be dominated by the various egalitarian idealisms with which we associate "the 60s."
Here's an earlier thread on Mister Rogers, and the significance of the fact that he was a lifelong Republican.
