At its inception, Current TV was envisioned as a news network for the people, by the people, where citizen journalists submitted content that was curated into shortform programming pods. But the lack of a cohesive programming strategy failed to impart the strong brand identity so crucial in an increasingly noisy media universe. The network’s most successful series — if not with viewers than with juries who hand out high-minded journalism prizes — is the investigative franchise Vanguard. A redoubt for longform investigative journalism, Vanguard and its journalists introduced American viewers to the harrowing practice of waterboarding in 2007, when “alleged” was still used to describe what the U.S. government was doing to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
“We aspire to be passionate truth-tellers,” says Al Gore. “And we undertake this mission at a time when the conversation of democracy in our country is distorted and really dominated by the point of view expressed on Fox News and influenced by the conglomerate ownership of every other news and information outlet on television. Some of them do a great job. But the net effect is that America’s civic discourse is now dominated by a point of view that for example gives the impression that eliminating the inheritance tax on the wealthiest 0.1 percent is way more important than dealing with the problems of tens of millions of unemployed Americans.”
Current is available in 60 million U.S. homes including Comcast (Ch. 107); Time Warner Cable (Ch. 103 in New York and Ch. 142 in Los Angeles); DirecTV (Ch. 358 nationwide); Dish Network (Ch. 196 nationwide); Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-verse.
