Al Gore's Army of Amateurs
After wading through hours of programming on Current, the new television channel co-owned and championed by Vice President Gore, I'm not sure whether I've witnessed the future of television news or spent too many evenings peering into an experimental cul-de-sac a boob tube version of YouTube, minus the freedom and fun.
Located on channel 103 of Time Warner's Digital line-up, Current was until a little more than two years ago the home of News World International (NWI), a round-the-clock affiliate of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation so sober, reasonable, and earnest in its desire to present a coherently reported portrait of the world, it was like NPR's "All Things Considered" with pictures.
That a supposedly model global citizen like Mr. Gore should have been responsible for taking the most broadly informative news channel available in America off the air is ironic, to say the least. But he has always been a man with an eye to the future. His new channel, he stated in 2004, would be aimed at the 1834 age bracket and presented "in a voice that young people recognize and from a point of view they identify as their own."
So what hath Al Gore, like, wrought? Whereas NWI was strictly a top-down affair, with current events presented by sternly articulate professionals who knew the ins and outs of obscure trade agreements and could name the leaders of countries most Americans have yet to hear of, its replacement celebrates people power and the democratizing virtues of using your cell phone as a camera even when people wish you'd turn the damn thing off.
Roughly 70% of Current's videos, or "podcasts" usually referred to as "pods" are created by paid correspondents, but the rest is viewer-created content. This makes Current somewhat revolutionary. On its Web site, current. tv.com, the channel encourages aspiring documentarians to submit pods, 37 minutes in length, which can be watched on the Internet and then voted (or not) onto the station itself. (Payment ranges from $500$1,000, while a 3090 second video shot with a cell phone potentially nets $100.)
Turn on Current and you might find just about anything: a guided tour of North Korea; a secret shoe store in the Lower East Side; the making of a flashy electric car; an AIDS clinic in Africa; a Halloween cartoon about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ("Star-Spangled Terror"); a competition between online gaming "athletes"in South Korea; dance music for babies; a trip through the Paris catacombs; a profile of U2 guitarist the Edge, and so on. It's not "news," it's "stuff," and watching it for a couple of hours is enough to make your head feel like the ball on a spinning roulette wheel.
That isn't to say the podcasts aren't occasionally interesting or informative. A blast of Current can be a refreshing change from the predictability of network news. Sometimes, a journalist's naivetι inadvertently helps the story. A case in point is a segment filed from the Syrian-controlled portion of the Golan Heights by Mariana van Zeller, a perky blonde a million miles from the dour, world-weary foreign correspondent you're used to.
The segment begins in Damascus, where Ms. Zeller announces that because "it's a very sensitive issue here in Syria," she will be accompanied to the Golan by a government minder, a gloomy, balding fellow named Mohammad Ali. One wonders whether Ms. Zeller is aware that quite a few issues are unusually "sensitive" in Syria. She is taken on a tour of a ghost town called Quneitra, a bombed-out relic of the 1973 war that the Syrian government perversely maintains in its ruination as an example of "Zionist aggression." (Once all of the Golan is liberated, Mr. Ali explains, it will be rebuilt in a jiffy. In the meantime: first propaganda, then housing.)
Ms. Zeller appears to swallow most of Mr. Ali's history lesson, but the following day brings a surprise: Her visit to Quneitra has been written up in a Damascus paper. She finds someone to translate the article, and discovers to her undisguised astonishment that the "report," which has her saying things she never said to people she never met, is pure fiction."That is an absolute lie!"she shrieks, laughing in amazement. Somehow her gullibility dramatizes the rote governmental brainwashing in a way a more seasoned journalist could never do. But the logical next step an attempt to visit the newspaper office and talk to the reporter is not even contemplated. "We have been made part of Syrian propaganda, but at least Current TV is now famous in Syria," Ms. Zeller concludes. At least she doesn't say,"It's all good."
Current's journalists may be unsophisticated, but its designers are whizzes. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the channel is its visual seamlessness. It's full of buzzy graphics, bright colors, and nifty computerized effects. The presenters (who have their own My-Space pages) are either nerdily chic or flat-out cute. Though the station carries regular advertising, its preference is clearly to enter into "strategic partnerships" with companies such as Yahoo, Google, and the Gap. Recurring features such as "Google's Top-Clicked Headlines" function both as promos and as a nod to traditional news gathering, while the Gap's "(Product) Red" ads, which raise money to combat AIDS in Africa, are treated as part of the news itself.
One commendable thing about Mr. Gore's television station is that its "citizen journalists" actually get paid for their efforts. However, the mediocre intellectual level and conformist tone of the journalism on display does not speak well either of Mr. Gore or of the generation of journalists he is attempting to nurture. Current is full of information, but little of it is consequential and none of it is questioned or analyzed rigorously. It's "news" as world music, an artfully blended mish-mash of just about everything except stubborn individuality or original thought. In other words, a politician's channel.
