Gore Went to Bat for Al Jazeera, and Himself, in Current Deal

Al Gore’s Current TV was never popular with viewers, but it was a hit where it counted: with cable and satellite providers.

When he co-founded the channel in 2005, Gore managed to get the channel piped into tens of millions of households — a huge number for an untested network — through a combination of personal lobbying and arm-twisting of industry giants. He called on those skills again after deciding in December to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera for $500 million. To preserve the deal — and the estimated $100 million he would personally receive — he went to some of those same distributors, who were looking for an excuse to drop the low-rated channel, and reminded them that their contracts with Current TV called it a news channel. Were the distributors going to say that an American version of Al Jazeera didn’t qualify, possibly invoking ugly stereotypes of the Middle Eastern news giant? The deal completed an eight-year odyssey for Gore and for Current TV that confirmed one of the realities of show business: it can be a lot easier to profit from a channel than to come up with must-see TV for viewers.