current tv via daily kos

It’s been pundit-firing season in Seattle area media, as cash-strapped station bosses seem to believe politics is a topic we don’t care or need to hear about.

After the November elections we’ve lost Robert Mak from KING, Bryan Johnson and Ken Schram from KOMO, Enrique Cerna from KCTS, and all the syndicated talkers who had been on Progressive Talk 1090. C.R. Douglas still covers local politics on KCPQ, but he’s on an increasingly lonely beat.

And nationally, Al Gore and megalawyer Joel Hyatt are now selling the little-watched cable channel Current TV to Al-Jazeera. The Qatar-based, pan-Arab news service is expected to rebrand Current to its own name, dropping all or most of its current lineup of pundit and documentary/reality shows.

The first incarnation of Current specialized in short-form documentary bits, often bought up cheap from aspiring filmmakers. Its second era began with the hiring of ex-MSNBC superstar Keith Olbermann, essentially the founding father of liberal talk TV. But Olbermann, as contentious a firebrand off-screen as on, repeatedly complained about the low budgets and sloppy production work, until Current fired him. After that, a post-Olbermann slate of talkers, including Eliot Spitzer, garnered as few as 40,000 viewers in prime time.

Hyatt, meanwhile, had signed deals with cable companies that restricted how much of the channel’s content could be posted online. That meant that even during the channel’s peak months with Olbermann, almost nothing from Current was on YouTube or iTunes, and was unviewable to households whose local cable companies didn’t receive the channel.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas claims Joel Hyatt was less interested in building audiences or even selling commercials than in finagling subscription fees from cable companies. Hyatt apparently told big cable operators that Current would get and keep viewers who might otherwise drop their cable (political liberals being notorious for claiming not to even own TV sets).

That, Moulitsas alleges, is why Hyatt signed those contracts that kept him from promoting the channel’s content online.

Also, as a one-channel indie operation, Current didn’t have a “family” of other channels to air its promos.

Without any efficient means to keep attracting viewers, cable companies openly questioned the value of keeping Current in their lineups. Hyatt knew it was time to cut his losses and sell out.

Eventually, someone besides MSNBC will figure how to do liberal talk properly, and will make a mint at it. It just wasn’t these guys.