Irrelevant TV

Al Gore is millions of dollars richer as a result of no longer trying to pretend that anyone is interested in what he has to say. He and partner Joel Hyatt sold their Current TV cable news channel to, of all companies, the Qatar-based al-Jazeera satellite news channel for half a billion dollars.  Al-Jazeera, which was founded and is owned by the Qatari government, airs throughout the Arab world, and it's known for its unvarnished and painfully truthful reportage of Middle Eastern affairs, which sometimes (if not often) casts the West in general and the United States in particular in a less-than-flattering light.

Al-Jazeera was willing to spend $500 million for Current TV because of its al-Jazeera English language channel's puny viewership in the U.S.  With the purchase of Current TV - now to be called al-Jazeera America - it hopes to increase its share of the U.S. market ninefold.  Current TV's audience only averages about 42,000 viewers nationally on any given night.  That's about the same size as the population of Burlington, Vermont - which, ironically, is one of the very few U.S. markets where anyone dares to offer al-Jazeera's English-language channel (called al-Jazeera English).  So imagine how many people al-Jazeera English was reaching in America already.  Probably not enough for a quorum.

Current TV was designed by Gore to get people involved in television broadcasting by providing viewer-created content, but the guy who helped make the Internet available for civilian use when he was in the Senate failed at taking an older medium - cable television -  and trying to make an interactive network out of it.  Current TV became a poor man's MSNBC, sometimes with the same MSNBC commentators and reporters who'd worn out their welcomes at that channel.  (And we all know how Keith Olbermann's defection to Current TV worked out.)  Current TV tried to jazz up their programming with other commentators as well, and that didn't help either.  Dude, if  former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, America's hottest female politician, can't draw a huge audience, how the heck could the suave former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom do any better? (News flash: Newsom, the current lieutenant governor of California and a future gubernatorial possibility there, quit Current TV once the Qataris bought it, so he could avoid the appearance of working for a foreign government.)

Some observers think that al-Jazeera's purchase of Current TV might be helpful because it will bring the sort of balanced coverage that's lacking in mainstream American media to mainstream American living rooms - assuming anyone watches TV in living rooms anymore - and because it will make Americans more informed about other parts of the world - assuming enough Americans even care about other parts of the world.  Americans aren't even more informed about al-Jazeera.  Because, contrary to popular wisdom, al-Jazeera has a reputation for being a serious, balanced news organization.  It's not a biased specialty channel that's deliberately trying to insinuate that American men are responsible for the evils of the world and should be regarded as no better than pond scum.

That's what Lifetime is. :-D