A revealing look at the mindset of the Left, including the man who came this close to the presidency in 2000:
Glenn Beck’s The Blaze approached Current about buying the channel last year, but was told that ‘the legacy of who the network goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view,’ according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
Based on Hyatt’s quote, the owners of Current TV didn’t want Glenn to purchase Current TV and put TheBlaze in millions of home across the country because they didn’t agree with his point of view. They must not feel the same way about Al Jazeera[.]
The Atlantic‘s Adam Clark Estes seems okay with that. His response to the news Current TV didn’t find Beck’s politics acceptable…
Well no kidding! Current TV is the network founded by former Democratic Vice President Al Gore, later anchored by progressive hero-villain Keith Olbermann and recently featuring liberal former New York governor Eliot “I Do What I Want” Spitzer. This is the network that Glenn Beck, the far-right fanatic that was too extreme for even Fox News to handle, wanted to buy.
Upon learning of the news of the sale, cable behemoth Time-Warner dropped the channel:
[W]hile the new channel will soon be available in 40 million households, Al Jazeera faced a setback when Time Warner Cable — which reaches 12 million homes — announced it was dropping the low-rated Current, which occupied a spot that could have been switched to Al Jazeera America.
Joel Hyatt, who co-founded Current TV with former Vice President Al Gore, told staff in a Wednesday night memo that Time Warner Cable ‘did not consent to the sale to Al Jazeera.’
‘Consequently, Current will no longer be carried on TWC,’ Hyatt wrote. ‘This is unfortunate, but I am confident that Al Jazeera America will earn significant additional carriage in the months and years ahead.’
A Time Warner Cable spokesman said in a statement that ‘our agreement with Current will be terminated and we will no longer be carrying the channel.’
Naturally, some on the Left are already screaming INTOLERANCE! At Time-Warner: “Time-Warner cable shows abject political and journalistic cowardice by dropping Current because of Al Jazeera deal,” tweeted Dan Gilmor, a technology writer and founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.
One wonders what protests Gilmor would have launched had Time-Warner dropped a channel acquired by Glenn Beck.
In the name of “tolerance” we’re going to be hearing a lot more of this from the institutional left in defense of Al Jazeera, even though it’s a network that advocates intolerance.
The Left’s thinking on matters such as these seems to work this way: You must be tolerant of all things, including intolerance unless, of course, it’s what we define as intolerance coming from conservatives or Christianity. Therefore, you must tolerate the fact that the Right’s intolerance must be crushed by an intolerance of that intolerance because diversity…
My head hurts.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC