Looming over everything from funding to programming is a recent decision by the FCC to allow cable companies to, in effect, significantly reduce funding for public, educational and governmental channels.
The Five Town Cable Cable Advisory Committee voted to send a letter to state Attorney General Maura Healey urging her to take legal action to reverse a decision made last month by the FCC that local access channels say would devastate their funding.
Those who run the county’s three access channels say the new rules, which would severely impact their revenue streams, would likely put them out of business and deprive the public of valuable programming available nowhere else.
Those who run the county's three access channels say the new rules, which would severely impact their revenue streams, would likely put them out of business and deprive the public of valuable programming available nowhere else.
North Adams Mayor Tom Bernard noted the irony that WWLP, the NBC affiliate in Springfield, sent a camera crew to the news conference but coverage of it would not be available to Charter's Berkshire County subscribers.
"Without these stations, Berkshire County residents lose access to Massachusetts-specific information that matters to them, including Boston sports and news from their state capital, which is not reported on by an Albany station in New York." U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, in a letter to Charter-Spectrum
There was also considerable grumbling about Berkshire County being included in the Albany, New York, television market, resulting in very few stations from Springfield or Boston in the channel line-up and, therefore, a dearth of news coverage concerning Massachusetts.
Markey cited solar and wind power as future drivers of the economy and he questioned why the Trump administration did not see it as a source of jobs for unemployed workers, especially the blue-collar workers Trump purports to represent.
"It was unfathomable to me that this president could do something so cruel, so un-American and, quite honestly, something that's just bad policy."
-- Brooke Mead, director of the Berkshire Immigrant Center
In their letter signed by Holly Morse of Mill River and 11 others: "It’s so SAD that John Faso is just miles away [in New York State], aiding and abetting the Trump Agenda.
Since the election, President-elect Trump has appointed climate deniers and friends of the fossil fuel industry to every single cabinet position pertaining to energy and environment.
