Former Vice President Al Gore once joked, “Al Gore is so boring, his Secret Service code name is Al Gore.” Gore is poised to become a prominent player in Current’s political convention coverage and this may not bode well for the struggling network, especially given a Reuter’s report in April on how badly it’s been doing: “Current TV has bigger problems to deal with than a potential lawsuit from fired news anchor Keith Olbermann – namely not getting kicked off Time Warner Cable for low ratings.”
Given the group that will be accompanying Gore on TV, Current isn’t planning to offer up anything akin to journalism. Gore will be joined by disgraced former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D), “Young Turk” Cenk Uygur and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) for coverage of both the Democrat and Republican conventions.
Party conventions are already orchestrated to mostly serve as political propaganda in the age of television. It’s difficult to imagine what value can be brought to watching one filtered through the analysis of even more, if now less relevant, political propagandists.
Nothing in circulating reports of the announcement suggests Current is doing anything to bring some sense of balance, or fairness, to their coverage. But if one happens to be a leftist dead-ender, while the country has been going in the opposite direction since the elections of 2010, I suppose it can’t hurt to mix up a batch of kool aide, drinking it down while watching one’s television.
Of course that assumes that Current TV is still broadcasting on Cable at that point. If it’s fair to ask whether a falling tree makes a sound in a forest if no one’s there to hear it, one is left to wonder, if Current TV ever does go off of Cable, or stops broadcasting altogether, who on earth besides Al Gore and a few now minor Democrats is ever going to know it?
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