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Al Gore: Democracy Will Help Save TV
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore brought his interactive Current TV channel to Britain on Monday, arguing that democracy will help save television in the Internet age and that television could help save democracy. Current TV now reaches 40 million homes in the United States and, from Monday, adds another 10 million on the Sky and Virgin Media platforms in Britain and Ireland. Gore sees the channel's mission as helping to reclaim television from the hands of a few powerful media moguls.
Gore said Current TV was designed "to democratize the medium of television and open it up to voices, so people can join the global conversation."
Mainstream television, he says, is a one-way conduit, and "a conversation that shuts out individuals begins to get a bit stale."
Story Continues Below Gore and his co-founder Joel Hyatt bill Current TV as "television for the Internet generation" of tech-savvy 18-to-34 year olds who demand interactivity - and, it seems, have short attention spans.
Current TV's programming is short and snappy, consisting of three-to- eight-minute current affairs "pods" that range from documentaries about the slums of Nairobi to Bono's day-in-the-life portrait of his U2 bandmate The Edge.
Some content comes from tie-ins with media heavy-hitters including Google and Lonely Planet. But it is the one-third that is viewer- generated - albeit edited and packaged by Current TV professionals - that Gore says sets the channel apart.
Boldly, he likens it to the invention of the printing press.
"Before the printing press, if you wanted to be a writer you had to be a monk," Gore said. "Modern democracy really came about in the wake of that communications revolution.
"Until now, if you wanted to be in television you had to work for some studio and after 20 years you could play a bit part in making a show about people eating bugs - and some good stuff, too.
"But it's not an individual creative vision that wins out."
Some argue that truly user-generated TV is an elusive goal. Adrian Monck, head of the journalism program at London's City University, points out that making documentary television remains "difficult, costly work" largely carried out by professionals.
"In the 1890s and 1900s people had great publishing ideas for using readers' letters to make newspapers," he said. "They were brilliant ideas but, with a very few exceptions, they went out of business because the quality control wasn't there."
In the wake of the Internet's video-sharing revolution - spearheaded by YouTube and similar sites - broadcasters around the world have rushed to incorporate viewer-created content into their programming.
Some argue that this is a case of the right message in the wrong medium - that the chaotic, unregulated Internet is the true heart of broadcasting democracy.
"It's fundamentally different," argued Gore. "Instead of going through a million different videos, some of which are the family dog - and a family you don't even know, and the dog's not very interesting - we will do that for you and find the highest quality, best produced, most fascinating, most compelling material that still reflects that raw creativity and fresh perspective of individuals."
Current TV, which has been on air in the U.S. since August 2005, makes more than a few nods to the look and feel of the Net, however, including a "shuffle" programming format and on-screen progress bar that lets the viewer know how much time an item has left to run.
Gore said the station would not reflect his own liberal and environmentalist views, but would feature programming "unimpeded by any filter other than quality" - although, unlike the Internet, it will have to comply with broadcasting standards rules.
"This is not going to be a political or ideological channel in any way, shape or form," he said. "We like to think of it as much more revolutionary than that."
© 2007 Associated Press.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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