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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Al Gore promises that Current TV will be as interactive and democratic as the Internet. But already his restless young audience is wondering whether the network will be another rerun.
Jul 11, 2005 | Josh Wolf, a 23-year-old college student who lives in San Francisco, is a filmmaker. Wolf is not, it's important to note, an aspiring filmmaker, that well-known species of young auteur willing to bide time in a series of tedious, steppingstone entertainment-biz jobs just to get a foot in Hollywood's front door. No, Wolf is the sort of filmmaker who actually makes films -- dozens of them, whenever the mood strikes him, about whatever he finds compelling. In recent months, a name for what Wolf does has come into fashion -- video blogging, or (gasp) "vlogging," -- but Wolf's films aren't simply a video version of a blog. Wolf is instead one of a number of tech-age documentarians who are setting up shop on the Web, a young person with a camera, a computer, server space, and a gut instinct for what's exciting and controversial and merits recording. To Wolf, that includes antiwar marches, anti-military protests, and lefty mayoral campaigns.
All of which is to say that Wolf was excited about participating in Al Gore's television revolution. More than a year ago, amid much fanfare, the former vice president joined several investors in an effort to create a television network for young people, a TV channel that specifically aimed to harness the energy that animates filmmakers like Wolf. From the beginning, Gore promised not just a TV network but a media revolution; like MTV, his channel would be for the youth market, but unlike anything we've seen before, the network would also be by young people, with much of the programming contributed by viewers armed with cameras.
"The Internet opened a floodgate for young people, whose passions are finally being heard, but TV hasn't followed suit," Gore told a crowd of supporters -- Wolf among them -- at a pre-launch party for the network held in San Francisco in April. "Our aim is to give young people a voice, to democratize television."
As Gore and his partners see it, TV today is a staid medium, one that can't match the interactivity of the Internet. But new technology -- cheap digital cameras and easy-to-use laptop-based editing tools -- have given young people new chances to televise their lives, to document what happens to them in ways that we don't see on CNN and the broadcast networks. "How many of you would like to see an opportunity to talk about what's going on in our world -- that you can participate in with television?" Gore asked the party revelers. On Aug. 1, when Current TV launches on several satellite and cable TV systems -- reaching, at first, about 19 million households -- Gore believes young people will finally get that opportunity.
But while Current will be televised, it's not at all clear that the revolution Gore has promised will make it to the screen. You can't argue with Gore's planned innovations -- interactivity, openness, a willingness to tell stories that buck the mainstream. What remains to be seen is whether his network can realize the goals without compromise. Television is a tough business, one in which entrenched interests -- advertisers, investors, politicians -- pull many strings. Gore says he wants to create a TV network that embodies the freewheeling air of the Web. But skeptics wonder if Current will really tell young people the stories nobody else will tell, the stories -- about the Downing Street memo, say, or Bush's bulge, or rumors of election fraud -- that often first emerge online.
Some Current observers say the former vice president's network looks less like a plan to remake TV than an attempt to make money by going after the lucrative youth market. In the past few months, many young filmmakers who initially saw Current as a perfect way to showcase their creativity have begun to change their minds about the network. Late last year, the network disappointed throngs of its most passionate supporters when it suddenly canceled an effort to hire hundreds of "digital correspondents" to work on its staff. The correspondents were to be full-time Current employees who'd roam the nation -- and possibly the world -- looking for provocative stories to bring to television. Thousands of people applied for the positions, and the network's unexplained cancellation of the program created a trail of ill will among the videographers. Contributors now work on a contract basis rather than as staff; the network says this is a "more democratic" practice than the digital correspondents program because anyone is free to send videos to the network.
Activist filmmakers like Wolf say that despite Current TV's revolutionary rhetoric, the station appears uninterested in hard-hitting political footage. As Ari Berman pointed out in the Nation in April, "'politics' is simply another word in Current's programming lineup, not a guiding theme." Wolf, who created a San Francisco "Meetup" group to bring other filmmakers to the network, says Current's rhetoric rings hollow. "My beef is not what they're doing, but the difference between what they're saying and what they're doing," he says. "I want to make television that makes people think. But I worry that Current TV seems to be making television that's very similar to other television. Television that you don't have to think about."
