Current TV. How Gore had a chance for a revolution and failed. [View all]

[madfloridian]

I just read this thoughtful article from The Hollywood Reporter. The picture of Keith Olbermann caught my eye.

How Al Gore Lost Current From the Start (Analysis)

In 2005, Al Gore and his business partner Joel Hyatt announced in San Francisco that their new cable channel, Current, was going to be revolutionary. Gore made lots of pronouncements about youth and modern media, and it seemed, if you cut through all the spin, that Current was going to be a cable channel dedicated to something different: It was going to be about social change. As if to hammer home that point, the launch party featured Sean Penn and Leonardo DiCaprio.

..."One thing, however, was very clear to Gore -- what Current would not be: "We have no intention of being a Democratic channel, a liberal channel or a TV version of Air America," he said. "That's not what we're all about. We are about empowering this generation of young people in the 18-to-34 population to engage in a dialogue of democracy and to tell their stories of what's going on in their lives, in the dominant medium of our time."

Except that is exactly what we needed back then bigtime. We needed a channel that was not afraid to tell the truth as they see it. I am thinking that now for 500 million we might have that channel in Al Jazeera.

.."This is what David Bohrman, president of programming for Current, said when he and Gore sat before us at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in January 2012: “So we are really, really excited about what we’re doing. Bringing Keith Olbermann to Current was the trigger, the transformational spark that showed Joel Hyatt and Al what we needed to be, what we could be, what the audience, conceivably what their appetite was for this kind of programming. So I was brought on board to help build it, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

Except by that time Olbermann was gone.

When the news of Current’s sale to Al Jazeera broke, there were no Sean Penn or Leonardo DiCaprio sightings. There was no talk of a youth revolution overturning staid media. There was only shock that a channel that never found out what it wanted to be and one almost no one watched was sold for a whopping $500 million.