Free Republic

Three weeks after announcing he would sell his struggling cable news channel, Current, to Al Jazeera — pocketing an estimated $100 million in profit — Al Gore skewered television news in an interview with BuzzFeed. "I think that the influence of television over the last half century has been harmful to the operations of our democracy," said Gore. "In the age of our founding, and for much of the history of the republic, crucial. Individuals could gain easy access to information and could express their own views. They can't do that on television." "They get plenty of information from it,...

Where can one look to find the ultimate hypocrisy today? One would think we could look to current politicians, among whom there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around. Or we could look to Al Gore, who preaches “green,” but makes more than $100 million from the “black gold” of Qatar. In selling Current TV, Gore’s failed television network, to Al Jazeera, he merely confirmed what nearly everyone knew about him: that the only green he believes in is the color of money. But to find the ultimate hypocrisy, we need only look a little further—for if you guessed it...

Before we heard that Al Gore's Current TV had rejected Glenn Beck's The Blaze TV as a buyer for, as Beck put it, "legacy" reasons and selected Al Jazeera as its white knight instead, Fjordman passed along this December 25 Deutche Welle interview with Aktham Suliman, Al Jazeera's former Berlin correspondent. Suliman argues that Al Jazeera's coverage is a policy instrument of its owners the Qataris, who, as he puts it, "tend toward the Muslim Brotherhood." Saudi-investor-funded Al Arabiya TV, on the other hand, is more Salafist. Big difference? Hah -- not when it comes to extending sharia. "Generally speaking,...

She compares the US to Qatar: "Al Jazeera doesn't generate revenue now anyway, it is a cost to the Qatari government, it's not a commercial decision, it's a very long term decision from an oil rich state." She continues: "Al Jazeera wishes to compete with CNN and the BBC...it presents a different perspective on the Arab Israeli conflict."