They killed their golden goose. MDA has finally decided no more TV special on Labor Day weekend. They had already destroyed the 21 hour annual telethon after kicking Jerry Lewis to the curb. The show was a fraud anyway at this point, as MDA regular counted corporate donations in their “telethon” total since Lewis left. I’ve already reported that they weren’t raising much money and couldn’t collect the pledges they’d received.
The show had been whittled down to a two hour pretape, a shadow of what Lewis had done with it. And now it’s gone. I see in the press release that the latest CEO of MDA, who’d moved the headquarters to Chicago, said the show was outdated. He also cited the Ice Bucket viral challenge as the new way of getting attention. But that was for ALS, not MDA. Someone should throw an ice bucket on MDA.
The real sadness here is that so many people around the country were motivated by, and counted on, the MDA Jerry Lewis telethon. The “Jerry’s Kids” rubric meant so much to people who had little hope and a lot of problems. The new MDA is out of touch with that. Lewis must feel that a lifetime of work has been flushed.
