Al Gore may have gotten a multi-million dollar payday from his new friends at Al Jazeera, but his Current TV employees don’t seem very excited about being sold to the Qatar-based network.
Current TV employees were called to an early staff meeting in San Francisco and via teleconference at the New York and Los Angeles offices in order to be introduced to their new Al Jazeera bosses.
Ehab Al Shihabi, executive director of Al Jazeera’s international operations, and Muftah Al Suwaidan, general manager of the London bureau, were in attendance; so was Al Gore’s partner, Joel Hyatt. But Al Gore, Current TV’s global warming-pushing star, was nowhere to be seen.
“Of course Al didn’t show up,” one staffer grumbled. “He has no credibility.”
Gore has been pushing his global warming snake oil for years now and has always done so in the offices of Current TV. But staffers feel Gore is “nothing but a bulls***ter” for having sold his stake in the cable network to some of the biggest oil producers in the world.
Some staffers are reported as having been disgusted by Gore’s insistence that the network play up stories about how great Obama’s tax hikes were going to be, yet Gore himself made sure to get his monumental payday before all those tax increases went into effect.
Already two of the flailing network’s putative “stars” have announced they are leaving their shows. Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm was the first to announce she was leaving. This week it was Eliot Spitzer’s turn to announce his departure.
Al Jazeera’s top men say that they’ll be taking over programming in April. The plan will be to “inform, inspire and entertain.”