Double-irony from Al Gore & Current TV:
It all starts with a story from The Atlantic Wire (A fairly left-leaning group:)
Every once in a while a tweet appears that’s so silly, it must be a joke. Like this one from Glenn Beck: “Before Al-Jazeera bought Current TV, TheBlaze looked into buying it but we were rejected by progressive owners.” Guess what? He’s totally serious. The Wall Street Journal caught the detail in its coverage: “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.”
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. It’s entirely unclear how far negotiations between Beck and Current TV got, if anywhere beyond Current’s executives laughing TheBlaze crew out of the room
via Yahoo! News.
So Al Gore & friends will not sell to Beck but will sell to Al-Jazeera. Damn!
But that’s not even the end of the story. News today is:
As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, Al Jazeera entered into an agreement to buy Al Gore’s failing network Current TV.
Hours later, as a result of the purchase, Time Warner Cable dropped the station with a message reading to viewers “This channel is no longer available on Time Warner Cable.”
According to multiple news sources, Current co-founder Joel Hyatt said in a statement that TWC dropped his TV network because TWC “did not consent to the sale to Al Jazeera.”
“Current will no longer be carried on TWC,” wrote Hyatt. “This is unfortunate, but I am confident that Al Jazeera America will earn significant additional carriage in the months and years ahead.”
The Huffington Post reported late Wednesday, “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.'”
Given TWC’s 12.5 million subscribers, it will be interesting to see how and if this impacts Al Jazeera’s decision to purchase Current.