...Al Gore and business partner Joel Hyatt...will close the deal to pay around $70 million to French-owned Vivendi Universal this week, making them the owners of the tiny digital-cable channel Newsworld International (NWI), moving Mr. Gore from politics to mini-media-moguldom [LOL!].Read the whole thing...it's hysterical! Question: Will Gore be able to resist the temptation to try making HIMSELF the network star?!It wasn’t easy for Mr. Gore to get his hands on NWI. According to two sources familiar with the situation, Mr. Gore went so far as to seek the influence of French President Jacques Chirac in buying the channel, hoping that Mr. Chirac would aid him in landing a sweetened deal...
For a time, Mr. Gore’s TV channel will maintain its current programming, for which there appears to be a very, very small market. NWI has carriage in about 20 million homes, and packages "foreign newscasts originally broadcast in countries such as Germany, Japan, Canada and the European community," ...
...the channel would... arm kids with cheap digital cameras and empower them to do an end run around the big media. [Gore does "The Blair Witch Project" as news!]
Mr. Franken agreed that the left had been lax during the techno-revolution while the right "felt a certain urgency, to their credit, and they had a lot of right-wing financiers who saw this as a need. A lot of them were trust-fund babies who inherited a lot of money and wanted to keep it and now have bought their way into the Congress and the Bush administration, and you have a lot of wealth trying to keep a lot of wealth and a very stacked deck in this country right now."
Mr. Franken has said he may only do his radio show for a year, depending on how he likes it. For him, there was a pointed political endgame to his own media pursuits—getting Senator John Kerry elected to the Presidency. "I think Rush has had some effect on elections, and I wouldn’t mind having some effect on this one," he said. "I don’t know how quickly … but hopefully we’ll be able to have some influence and some effect on the way people think."
A year? LOL! Keep on dreaming.
Watch as the NWI circles the bowl under algore and his band of youngsters with cameras. I do wish algore would do a simulcast of Franken's show, there's nothing quite as entertaining (for me) than to watch liberals make asses of themselves.