As I get ready to do MY time-honored New Year's Eve tradition by turning into bed early, I still shake my head as I read again about Comcast eliminating all their local television production spots.
In a way, I'm not surprised. From the time I began volunteering down there in 1993, they seemed to be condensing operations, moving staff, eliminating this studio, eliminating that service. Every ensuing year would be a letdown as far as expectations go.
Half our shows were aired live. One of them was an hour-long news magazine, complete with correspondents, roll-in footage and everything. And everyone was treated to a breakfast out for their trouble, paid for by Comcast. This past year, all live shows were eliminated. We still had a call-in sports show and a call-in astrology show which had 33 years of airtime combined. When they lost that aspect of being live, the shows went downhill.
I know Sandy, the hostess of the astrology show. I'm not a numerology nut, but I'll listen to any idea once, and Sandy was the only one who could make numerology sound sensible to me. She's been on the air twenty years in this market. We had to turn away calls because she was so popular in the day. Now she wonders where she'll be able to produce the show again.
You could easily suggest Sandy go to the "competitor". Problem is, we've eliminated all those here. Comcast is as much of a monopoly as any company can be, and their only "competition" doesn't even compete as far as local programming goes. There is no viable alternative. Any video production company out there these days are more interested in videotaping weddings and birthdays for private exhibition versus anything that could be seen on TV. We used to have full access to the studio at Henry Ford College. In a precursor of things to come, they shut it down in 1999 because they forsaw "no viable future use" of the medium there.
Most of our volunteers, initially, were seniors. Sixty percent of the volunteers when I hired in were 65 or over. Doing this work was their livelihood; it got them out of their homes and enabled them to be around people in a way that Senior Center activities can't quite do. You always got something educational out of it... whether it was learning a new position, or learning something new about the program itself.
Yes, my college degree has been laying dormant for some time now. But even the most optimistic, proactive person would not have wanted to see this coming.
It's simply another case of one company's short-sighted cost-cutting hurting the people who make that business, as well as the business of the world, go.
