Today, from Al Gore to Al Jazeera America

At the beginning of 2013, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, owners of Current TV sold their cable network to the royal family of Qatar, to become Al Jazeera America.  The sale was in January, the premiere of the actual new network will be this afternoon.  The network reaches a potential audience of approximately 50 million viewers.

Live Current programming ended last week, with continuously running documentaries, one of the other staples of Current TV, filling in the schedule until Tuesday afternoon, August 20th, when new live Al Jazeera America programming takes over.  The Hollywood Reporter notes that will be about 14 hours of live programming each day.

The Hollywood Reporter notes:

There will be plenty of familiar faces. Nearly 850 employees have been hired to staff 12 newly opened U.S. bureaus. AJAM's flagship show, America Tonight, is billed as an hourlong current affairs newsmagazine hosted by CNN veteran Joie Chen. CNN's Starting Point anchor, Soledad O'Brien, will be a special correspondent for the show and will produce documentaries for the network.
Other weeknight shows include Consider This, a talk show hosted by former ABC News correspondent Antonio Mora, and Real Money, anchored by former CNN chief business correspondent Ali Velshi. There will also be the social media-driven The Stream, co-hosted by Lisa Fletcher, formerly of ABC News, and Wajahat Ali, a playwright and essayist who appeared on the Al Jazeera English version of the show.
The documentary unit will be headed by Kathy Davidov, formerly vp production at National Geographic Television. The channel also boasts an investigative team headed by journalist Ed Pound, recently a staff correspondent at National Journal. The headquarters and broadcast center of AJAM is on West 34th Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan.

And, as also noted by the Hollywood Reporter, by building their news network from the ground up, as one of the few entities that is expanding rather than contracting their news resources, and investing in actual reporting by professionals, they are the exception rather than the norm:

"[Al Jazeera America] has formidable resources overseas, bolstered by Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic. "There are 70 bureaus overseas in addition to the 12 in the U.S.," said O'Brian in the conference call. "It gives us an amazing competitive advantage to be able deploy resources into places that our competitors really don't have the ability to do so as easily."

I doubt that Al Jazeera America will appeal to the homophobic and isolationists conservative segment of the U.S. who distrust everything foreign, especially from predominantly Muslim countries. But given enough time, they could make a considerable impact, potentially, in programming share.  At the very least, they appear to be willing to make an in-depth try.

It is worth noting here, in the larger context of the controversies over domestic spying, that our stat counter account has shown that penigma gets checked out regularly by Homeland Security if we cite any part of Al Jazeera English as a source or feature content from them, despite that content frequently featuring some very good coverage.  But then we also get checked out by other sources from the political right when we run commentary on ALEC, the Koch Brothers, etc. who seem to keep very careful tabs on their critics.  And to be fair, when I look at what some of those Homeland Security 'hits' are on, it is not always new content, but is (with surprising frequency) on this old post, about the vintage cartoon character Deputy Dawg. 

Maybe, like the broadcast networks do, to gain American trust and curiosity, Al Jazeera America should run some retro cartoons, if only on Saturday morning.  It could only broaden their appeal, and work to gain the trust of Americans. - perhaps more so than serious programming.