Matt Lauer grills Al Gore says Current TV ‘objective’ and there’s no hypocrisy in selling to a oil company
Matt Lauer pressed Al Gore on the implications of selling Current TV to Al-Jazeera, a global news organization that isn’t sponsored by Big Oil interests, but owned by them.
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Reaching back to Gore’s own book The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, Lauer asks Gore not once but twice how he can square his accusations that other news organizations are bought by Big Oil and then sell his to Qatari oil emirs.
Here’s from the transcript:
LAUER: And yet even as you sold to Al Jazeera, you in the book blast other television news programs saying this. Virtually every news and political commentary program is sponsored in part by oil, coal and gas companies. Not just during campaign seasons but all the time year in and year out with messages designed to soothe and reassure the audience that everything is fine, the global environment is not threatened. And the critics jumped. And they said, here’s the guy who just sold Current TV to Al Jazeera which gets an undetermined amount of funding from the country of Qatar which gets its money from oil reserves. Isn’t there a contradiction in that?
GORE: I certainly understand that criticism. I disagree with it.
In the interview, Gore goes on to defend the selling of the network “because Al Jazeera has obviously long since established itself as a really distinguished and effective news gathering organization,” but, again, Lauer does not let him get away so easily.
LAUER: But from a country that bases its wealth on fossil fuels and fossil fuels are the enemy, you targeting climate change, isn’t there a bit of hypocrisy in that?
GORE: Well, I get the criticism. I just disagree with it because this network has established itself. It’s objective. It’s won major awards in countries around the world. And its climate coverage as I said a moment ago has been outstanding and extensive.
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