Anchor Helps the Unemployed
/WRGB (Albany, NY) Anchor Anne McCloy is doing what state and federal officials are not.
She is helping those that have lost their jobs during the pandemic get the benefits they need.
It started when McCloy found 71-year-old Gabor Radnai wandering around the station parking lot, crying and clutching a pile of paperwork.
“Why did you drive your papers here?” Anne McCloy, an anchor at CBS-6 Albany, asked Radnai.
“They can’t help me,” he said. “Maybe you can.”
The Atlantic writes that Radnai was working at a local ski resort. In March, after he lost his job, he applied for unemployment, but a letter from the state unemployment office said he needed to call them to complete his claim. He tried for months but couldn’t get through over the phone. So, in a last-ditch attempt to reach someone in authority, he drove an hour from his home to WRGB.
Radnai was the first unemployed American to visit McCloy at her office. But he was not the last. In the months since then, thousands of people have emailed and called her about problems getting through to unemployment agents—and she has been trying to help them all. McCloy is widely cited as a hero by people she has helped, as well as in Facebook unemployment groups, where people urge those seeking help to contact her. But if a news anchor has to step in to ensure that Americans get the benefits they’re entitled to, there may be something wrong with the system.
McCloy made it her mission to help the people that needed help. She dogged government officials until changes were made. Sometimes people who have been waiting weeks—or even months—contact McCloy and hear from the department the next day. “I can’t believe this worked; you’re an angel,” one of them told her.
It would be a mistake to see McCloy’s role in helping unemployed Americans as a simple feel-good story. “It shouldn’t be this way,” one of the New Yorkers McCloy helped explained to her. “I shouldn’t have to contact my local news station. I should be able to trust the system.”
McCloy is a news anchor, not a government worker. But she has used what power she has to make up for the government’s failures.
“What am I supposed to do when someone emails me that they’re considering suicide because they don’t have money?” she told me. “It almost feels like if I don’t do something about this, then I’m not doing my job. This could be the most important thing I ever do in my life.”
McCloy is being held as a hero and it is good to see a Journalist helping out.
This is actually why some people get in the business and not to just post selfies online and talk about themselves. Anne McCloy gives us hope for the TV news business.
