Al Gore

March 31, 2010 World Screen

When Al Gore lost the presidential election to George W. Bush, in 2000, many inside and outside the world of politics wondered what he would do next. Not many could have imagined that Gore would go on to win a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming and an Academy Award for the feature-length documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and launch a multiplatform media company aimed at young viewers, whose goal was to open television to voices that were not heard on conventional networks. All of these accomplishments go right to the heart of issues that Gore has championed for years, as a student, as a U.S. senator and as vice president: protecting the environment, defending democracy and unlocking the power and potential of the Internet. 

After that embattled 2000 presidential election, Gore teamed up with the businessman Joel Hyatt in 2002 and co-founded Current Media. The cable and satellite channel and its sister website pioneered a new type of television: one that consisted of content, and even commercials, created by viewers and highlighting citizen journalism.

In this exclusive interview Gore talks about his views of the media, democracy and today’s youth.

WS: What sparked the idea for Current as a multiplatform company with a TV channel and a website that feature viewer-generated content?
GORE: I have long believed that television plays a far more important role in shaping our democracy than most realize and that any of us think about very much. With the rise of the Internet and ever better and more affordable video cameras and editing software, it seemed that the time was right to empower the viewers to television and to create their own content. This is a shared vision of Joel’s and mine. It is an interest of mine that goes back a long way. I wrote my senior thesis in college on the impact of television on the American Constitutional system and have long been interested in related topics. I wrote a book a few years ago called The Assault on Reason that explores some of these same ideas.

But Current was really intended as an effort to democratize the medium of television and to explore the boundaries between television and the Internet, with an eye to giving people an ability to connect with one another, tell the stories that are important to them, and use information as a source of self-determination in our democracy.

The whole idea of representative democracy in its modern guise was borne of the [American] Revolution and in the information ecosystem brought by the printing press. And the founders of the United States were steeped in the Enlightenment values that really were a product of the printing press. And when television followed hard on the heels of radio, the recentralizing force of broadcast technology tended to exclude many people from the political process. The new technology brought by the Internet makes it possible to connect to the television medium with very low entry barriers for individuals and to reinvigorate democracy by bringing the conversation of democracy into the TV medium. That was really the initial impetus for Current.
 
WS: You’ve also made a commitment to investigative journalism, something that on the mainstream networks is fast disappearing. Why was that important to you?
GORE: Both Joel and I care a great deal about the integrity of our democracy. As you know, our founders believed that a well-informed citizenry was, to use their phrase, “the bedrock of American democracy.” With the [demise] of newspaper business plans and the slow emergence of a new standard model that throws off enough revenue in the Internet space to support investigative journalism, we wanted to make certain that we had a strong and well-funded commitment to the highest quality investigative journalism and we are very proud of the Vanguard [investigative journalism] team and the quality of the work they have brought to TV and to current.com. We are now in the process of enlarging that commitment to investigative journalism. I used to be an investigative journalist, by the way.
 
WS: To take what you said one step further, if we look at television news nowadays, especially cable news, it is so concerned with getting the pithy sound bite or creating conflict between two sides, as opposed to getting to the heart of issues. Are voters getting shortchanged when so many complex issues are explained in 30-second sound bites?
GORE: Voters are being shortchanged. The public-interest standard, which played a more prominent role in television, has been slighted in recent decades and the public has suffered as a result. I often hear the anchors on the major network news programs say something like, “And now for tonight’s in-depth report,” and I reflexively look at my watch, and the evening’s in-depth report is rarely two minutes long!

With the exception of 60 Minutes and Frontline and the work of a few other journalists, and I’m proud to include the Vanguard team in that small circle, the kind of in-depth investigative journalism that democracy depends upon has been in short supply in recent years.
 
WS: If it’s fair to say that only political candidates who have enough money to buy large amounts of television advertising will be able to run successful campaigns, how does this affect the democratic process, not to mention the Supreme Court’s recent decision to lift the ban on political spending by corporations during election campaigns?
GORE: It is causing severe damage to American democracy. The radical step taken by the Supreme Court in erasing so many progressive safeguards going back more than 100 years, in a case that did not even require them to deal with these questions in order to make a decision, is radical and reckless judicial activism in service of an ideology that is in important respects contrary to the principle values and beliefs of America’s founders.
 
WS: And in terms of candidates who have large amounts of money to invest in television spots, is that cutting a lot of valid candidates out of the picture?
GORE: Yes it is, and going back to the discussion of this historic transition in the information ecosystem defined by the printing press and the emergence of the television age, it used to be much easier for individual citizens and candidates to use information and knowledge as a source of influence and political power, but with the beginning of television’s dominance in the political system, the requirement of sums of money in order to communicate ideas effectively began to erode some of the most important aspects of our democracy.

Now the rise of the Internet brings a hopeful prospect of lowering the entry barriers for individuals as citizens and candidates to communicate freely and well, but these are still the early days of the Internet. Television is still completely dominant with 80 percent of the campaign budgets in both major political parties going to the purchase of 30-second television ads.
 
WS: Do you have hopes that the Internet will someday surpass television and make it possible for people to really take part in representative democracy?
GORE: Yes. I don’t think there is any question that it’s only a matter of time before television, in the words of the novelist William Gibson, [becomes] “the digital universe,” and that’s already starting to happen in a small way, but it’s going to take a considerable amount of time yet to make that transition. But as the Internet becomes more prominent in the media universe, it will bring with it greater empowerment of individuals and reinvigorate our democracy. It’s not an accident that today virtually every reform movement is largely based on the Internet.

WS: I remember the Nixon versus Kennedy televised debates and the value of having an attractive, “telegenic” candidate. Could Franklin Roosevelt make it today in his wheelchair as a disabled candidate or does television have an impact at that level?
GORE: I think it does have an impact at that level, but I think that the more serious impact is the requirement of huge sums of money as a prerequisite for a serious candidacy. Because that causes candidates to feel the necessity of going back to business lobbies and other special interests over and over again to raise the large sums needed. Over time, that naturally erodes the ability of those candidates and elected officials to make the public interest their principal focus, because they feel the necessity of returning to the special interests for the next campaign, and naturally that will put in their mind a predisposition to give them the benefit of the doubt on any vote that may affect their desire to contribute in the future. That’s not bribery but the steady erosion of the ability elected officials must have to focus as much as possible on the public interest.
 
WS: Yes, and on issues such as employment, education and environment, an issue that is very important to you. Is the media doing a good enough job in getting out the word about the environment and climate change? I ask because I’m sure you were told in journalism school, as I was, that science stories and economics stories are the most difficult to tell, especially on television, because, as you said, reporters are lucky if they get two minutes for an in-depth story. What more could the media do?
GORE: Well, they could do a lot more, of course, because it’s the defining challenge of our time and it coincides with the cutting of news budgets and the growing perception of news within many large media companies as a profit center. That tends to blur the dividing line between news and entertainment, and that works against the commitment needed to have an adequate treatment of issues like the climate crisis.
 
WS: Are you still giving the lectures and are you thinking of making more documentaries?
GORE: I still give my slide show on a regular basis, and I recently spent four hours integrating hundreds of new slides to update it. I don’t have any present plans to do another movie documentary, but I would certainly look forward to doing another one at some point in the future if that becomes feasible.
 
WS: And more books?
GORE: I recently published a new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, which reached number two on The New York Times best-seller list and is doing extremely well in countries around the world. It came out in November and I would say I’m still in the period of time that it is not wise to ask me if I’m about to do another book.

WS: From your involvement in Current and the slide shows on climate change you give, what have you learned about what young people care about and what they want from media?
GORE: They care about the climate crisis. They care about protecting our national security against this ridiculous overdependence on foreign oil. They care about creating new jobs and a bright future that a commitment to renewable energy and a low-carbon economy can bring. They want transparency and openness in their media. They want to connect with their friends and peers and social groups in the context of the media they are consuming, and they are extremely sophisticated in their understanding of media and media technologies. And they are driving a lot of the changes now under way in the media marketplace, as everyone knows.
 
WS: And they don’t want to pay for anything! They don’t want to pay for cable subscriptions, they don’t want to pay for newspapers because they read them online. That’s going to create a problem down the road for media companies.
GORE: That’s true, but it may be an overstatement if you look at what is happening in gaming, for example: micropayments, virtual goods, subscriptions for content deemed to be sufficiently differentiated and valuable. All of those trends challenge the oft-stated assumptions that people won’t pay for online content. The low entry barriers for content creators guarantees that there will be always an enormous amount of free content, and that’s a good thing. But I think that over time the shift toward a willingness to compensate content creators for premium content is a trend you are going to see grow. New business models are already emerging and they integrate micropayments that are deemed culturally and economically acceptable to that generation of young consumers you are talking about.

 

 

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