Jennifer Granholm -- not going to be an Al-Jazeera TV star

 

Jennifer Granholm wasted little time in severing ties with her Current TV show "The War Room" after the owner of the cable network, former vice president Al Gore, announced that he had sold the channel to Al-Jazeera, the leading source of TV news in the Arab world.

On her Facebook page, the former Michigan governor wrote:
"We were told today that Al Jazeera is the buyer for Current TV. My agreement with Current was for the duration of the election (and the sale). It has been a very fun adventure; we are blessed with a wonderful team. We'll continue to broadcast The War Room for the next few weeks through the transition, but after that I'll be going back to teaching, speaking and other things."

Al-Jazeera, owned by the government of Qatar, plans to gradually transform the relatively obxcure Current into a network called Al-Jazeera America by adding five to 10 new U.S. bureaus beyond the five it has now and hiring more journalists. More than half of the content will be U.S. news and the network will have its headquarters in New York, spokesman Stan Collender told AP.
In addition to Granholm, Current's leading personalities are former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, and Cenk Uygur, a former political commentator on MSNBC who hosts "The Young Turks." Current signed Keith Olbermann to be its top host in 2011 but his tenure lasted less than a year before it ended in bad blood on both sides.

Once an outlet for anti-Israeli vitriol and a constant source of criticism of the U.S. and the West, Al-Jazeera formed an English-speaking outlet in 2006 and gradually established credibility in journalism circles.In a statement announcing the deal, it touted numerous U.S. journalism awards it received in 2012, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Grand Prize and the Scripps Howard Award for Television/Cable In-Depth Reporting.

But the station is still accused of anti-American bias.
The nation's second-largest TV operator, Time Warner Cable Inc., immediately dropped Current after the deal was confirmed Wednesday, a sign that the channel will have an uphill climb to expand its reach.
Gore confirmed the sale Wednesday, saying in a statement that Al-Jazeera shares Current TV's mission "to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling."