Al Radio and Al TV....the Future of Media???

Last week, the television industry was rocked by the debut of "Current", the new cable channel introduced by that maven of the entertainment world, none other than Al Gore.

Current is "the first national network created by, for and with an 18 to 34 year old audience", according to this press release on their website, www.current.tv.

Rather than a traditional network...Current offers short-form programming, the TV equivalent of the iPod shuffle. Its "pods" primarily consist of 15-second to 5-minute segments that run throughout the day, exploring the people, places, happenings and hot-button issues of interest to young adults.

A listing of some of its features includes:

CURRENT ISSUE - Drugs, relationships, political hot topics
CURRENT NEWLYWEDS - New married couples, including behind closed doors
CURRENT HOTTIE - Off-the-radar and onto the screen, from librarians to lifeguards, a look at those that are making heads turn and jaws drop
CURRENT LIES - What the media is telling you that isn't true (my note: this oughtta be rich!)
GOOGLE CURRENT - What our audience is searching for on the web

Can you just picture Al Gore sitting around, cooking this stuff up? "Yeah, yeah, this is cool---they'll like this!"

BCBeat, The Blog of Television, sentenced one of its interns to do a minute-by-minute blog of Current's first day. You can read it here. Pretty interesting. I give it a year, eighteen months tops.

Meanwhile, the arterial bleeding continues at "Air America", the brainchild of the other Al...Al Franken.

According to The Scrapbook column in The Weekly Standard (available online only to subscribers),

Full details having yet to be revealed, The Scrapbook has decided to withhold all comment on an emerging scandal involving massive financial improprieties at the Al Franken-headlined liberal talk-radio network Air America. Really, we mean it. That spring 2004 scheme by which the network's then-top executive appears to have diverted nearly $900,000 in New York City-funded social service grants from a Bronx-based charity to Air America's own desperately underfunded bank accounts? Mum's the word.

Meantime, though, we figure there's nothing wrong with noting the latest listenership data from Arbitron. "Now that it's possible to compare ratings for this spring to last year's start-up," the Philadelphia Inquirer's Beth Gillin reports, "it's clear that [Air America] has yet to climb out of the cellar." In particular, Franken's decision to schedule his show in direct competition with conservative talk-radio superstar Rush Limbaugh "was not such a good idea," it turns out. "Limbaugh . . . has squashed Franken like a bug."

At its flagship station in New York, Air America's audience is down 14 percent. In Philadelphia, moreover, Arbitron reports that the network has "fallen off the charts . . . meaning there were too few listeners to measure during the second quarter of this year."

It makes me think of a new twist on the old puzzler...if a blowhard falls in the forest and no one is there to hear....does he still make a sound?