[TheCookMan]

"The plan never got off the ground, according to a source."

HA!

[smith288]

I love the idea of Gore commenting on his failed attempt to get a "liberal" voice on cable in a year or so....

[Quilla]

While flipping channels yesterday evening, I caught Al Franken on Court TV's Catherine Cryer (sp) Live show. Although he spoke in sentence fragments and came across as an absolute idiot, I did catch one coherent statement. He was asked about future plans of becoming the voice of liberals. He said yes he was working on a potential radio show and stated Al Gore was handling the television end of it.

[Redbob]

Are they suicidal?

A TV network comprised of the Liberals and the French?

I fearlessly predict bankruptcy in 6 months - and that includes re-runs (like Gary Hart, I mean).

[George W. Bush]

...French-owned Vivendi Universal...

Frog alert. Looks like it's stillborn but should be watched. The French and the Dims would love to have aa outright propaganda outlet in the states.

[MindBender26]

False alarm. The essence of any successful cable program is getting LOCAL cable operators to give you a channel on the local cable. The competition is intense. Local systems have 20 to 250 AVAILABLE channels. There are 2000+ cable cannels trying to get on them.

To be successful, a national cable channel must be avaialble at 20+ homes. Gore might get 2-4 million avails, tops. For Gore, 4 million avails might mean 20,000 samplers, 5,000 regular viewers, with many of them in "non-desirable" demographics. Business-wise, a death ship

Idea sunk before it started.

[TexasNative2000]

non-ideological answer to Fox News

Huh? How do you answer what you consider to be an idealogical network with a non-idealogical one?

[.cnI redruM]

Al Franken, Al Gore, Al Quaeda - six of one, 1/2 dozen of the other.

[Timesink]

This is a bloody hilarious concept, but the author is blowing out of all proportion a meaningless meeting that took place many months ago, long before the NBC merger deal came along. There's no way in hell NWI will be turned into GoreTV, for two main reasons:

1) Half the point of the proposed NBC-Universal merger is that NBC needs more leverage with cable companies, so that they can force local cablecos to carry all their channels, and carry them via contracts that are more profitable for NBC. ("Oh, you won't carry Bravo? Okay, fine, in that case we're yanking CNBC, MSNBC, USA...") The more channels they have, the more muscle they have with the cablecos. So why sell off NWI? Especially when it could so easily be adapted to fit into the NBC News family (as some sort of extension to MSNBC, CNBC or both)? It doesn't make sense.

2) People tend to severely underestimate the amount of money it takes to launch a real news channel these days. CNN was launched on a shoestring, but cable barely existed in 1980, and even then CNN literally came within days of closing down more than once in its first two or three years. By 1996, when Fox and MSNBC came along, it was a whole different world. The only reason MSNBC was able to launch was because they cannibalized an already-existing channel (remember America's Talking?) and were able to split the costs between to giant corporations: GE and Microsoft. And there are many who believe that to this day, the only reason MSNBC "makes money" is because accounting tricks allow GE to use it to amortize the overall costs of running NBC News in general and because Microsoft can lump its share of the costs into "the price of runing MSN.com."

There's no question Fox News makes real money, but again, the amount of money Murdoch (via his own giant megaconglomerate) had to invest was gigantic, especially since he had to buy off cablecos all over the country with ten-year contracts paying THEM to carry FNC, because digital cable didn't really exist back then and it was the only way he could get access to channel slots at all.

NWI, on the other hand, carries essentially ZERO original programming, and suffers from being way out on the digital tier, when it's available at all. (Believe it or not, it really does matter that CNN, Fox and MSNBC are on analog channels - in Manhattan, they're on Channels 10, 46 and 43, respectively - while NWI is up on Channel 103. Viewers spend most of their time flipping around on the "regular" channels below channel 80, and only bounce up to the digital channels when they can't find anything they want to watch on the lower channels.) Even if Gore's little band of lunatics was able to grab the channel, where would they get the money to do anything with it? Look at how much trouble they're having launching their "radio network," and that is NOTHING compared to the logistics and costs of launching a cable TV channel. All you need for a radio network is a single radio studio (and heck, you can RENT that), one or two shows to start out with that probably wouldn't need more than five or six staffers each, and a satellite transponder; from there it's just a matter of convincing enough stations to carry enough individual shows to somehow eke out a profit. To run a TV news channel, however, you need to produce at LEAST 18 hours a day of original, mostly live, programming, which requires millions upon millions of dollars' worth of equipment, an entire building devoted to the purpose, hundreds and hundreds of employees ... where are they going to get that kind of money? And keep on getting it for the four to five years MINIMUM it would take before the channel started turning a profit, even if their business plan worked PERFECTLY?

The obvious answer: They can't, and they aren't. At best, they could turn it into an all-liberal version of what the old America's Talking was - talk radio on TV, produced so cheaply it was embarrassing to watch ... and not many people did. And that was even though America's Talking was not a digital tier channel; it was right there next to ESPN and The History Channel and everything else. MindBender26 appears to have missed the line in the article that mentioned NWI already reaches 20 million homes, but I think the rest of his numbers are about right. GoreTV might get 5,000 to 10,000 viewers in prime time, almost all of whom would be people with little money (hell, most would be virulently anti-capitalist anyway) to which no company would have any desire to advertise. GoreTV would not be able to survive with those numbers, even it was a bare-bones, all-talk network.

[bert]

.....It was unclear how the venture would be financed.....

alGore will tap the money laundered from Russia and placed in his Zurich account by Marc Rich.

[mabelkitty]

Joel Hyatt, son-in-law of former Democrat Ohio Senator, Howard Metzenbaum, and embarrassingly failed senatorial run to Mike DeWine.

Joel Hyatt, of Hyatt Legal Services.

[Pagey]

Successful Liberal Radio is an Oxymoron and technically an impossibility.You see, the Dumbocrats stand for nothing and are bitter.Bitter people can’t and won’t promote their own ideas and they won’t take responsibility for advocating their actual ideas and besides most democrats are intellectually bankrupt.Let me use Hillary Clinton as the Perfect example of The Rats being Intellectually Bankrupt--- from an article in Capitalism Magazine last year:
"One of the reasons people like Hillary Clinton come across as so bitter is that they have nothing to offer, and they’re smart enough to know it. For a woman like Hillary Clinton, whom I suspect craves power like you or I could never begin to imagine, it’s particularly frustrating. Her life has been one huge compromise – against feminism (by defending her sexually predatory husband); against welfare statism (by allowing her husband to sign off on welfare reform and capital gains tax cuts); and even against her youthful inclinations as a limited government/Barry Goldwater/Ayn Rand fan.
All this compromise has been in the pursuit of one thing only: power. She wants power from the people and over the people, but there’s only one problem: the people keep demanding ideas. She’s afraid to articulate her real ideas, of course, because if she did she would end up like she did after her infamous 1994 health care debacle. So Hillary, like her supporters throughout the country, are left with a single emotion and a single policy: bitterness".

SLAP!

[sheik yerbouty]

Gore should be arrested for reckless eyeballing.