The most amazing thing about Current TV, the new cable
channel featuring documentaries made by young people for young
people, is not that it was founded by former Vice President Al
Gore but that it's actually really good. At just one year of
age, Current hasn't quite yet achieved its goal to “take
back TV” from corporate conglomerates, but it has
succeeded in airing smart, sophisticated, and absorbing
documentaries and enabling, for the first time ever, an ongoing
creative collaboration between the people sitting in front of
the boob tube and the people working behind it. Current's target
demographic is people between the ages of eighteen and
thirty-four, and the way the station works is that anyone can
submit a documentary from thirty seconds to eight minutes long
(called a “pod”) about whatever subject they choose.
Meanwhile, their peers log on to
currentv.com
and vote for the
videos they want to see aired on television. In this way, over
thirty percent of Current TV's content is “viewer
controlled.” The rest of its pods are produced in-house;
for example, Current Soul, featuring Gotham Chopra's
(son of bestselling spiritual author Deepak) journeys into
contemporary spirituality.
Gore, who is also on the board of Apple and a consultant for
Google, believes that just as the internet has connected young
people and enabled them to articulate their perspectives like
never before, through platforms such as blogs and countless
websites, so can television. As one early supporter put it,
“If people, young people in particular, can experience
news gathering and news storytelling as a participatory act,
they would come to understand that interpreting the world around
them is a collective proposition.” Although Current has
been somewhat justifiably criticized in the past year for
focusing too much on its image and looking like a kind of
“MTV for documentaries,” the station seems to be
proving popular: it airs in twenty-eight million homes each day.
And to Current TV's and its viewers' credit, the documentaries
are consistently compelling and cover an incredible number of
facets of young people's lives—anything and everything
from fashion, relationships, travel, and politics to the
environment, music, AIDS, parenting, war, and world history.
Current isn't the only cable television station airing
programs and documentaries that try to bring global news and
information into American living rooms. Link TV, whose slogan is
“Your connection to the world,” has been around for
five years and is currently available in over twenty million
American households. Though not specifically designed for the
younger crowd, its goal is much the same as Current's: to bypass
the limitations of the corporate mass media and use television
as a vehicle for connecting people to some of the most important
global issues of the day. It provides information about
nonprofit volunteer programs around the world and has
partnerships with organizations like Chat the Planet, which
connects young people from Africa to Alabama via
videoconferencing to engage in dialogue with each other about
their lives and politics. Unlike Current TV, Link TV has zero
commercials and forgoes the sound-bite-length documentaries in
favor of news shows and independent films that are often several
hours long. Many, if not the majority, are extremely well made
and emotionally impacting. For example, a recent documentary on
reconciliation efforts between individuals of opposing political
parties on the island of Papua New Guinea after a ten-year civil
war repeatedly brought this viewer to tears.
Granted, most of Link's programs are so sincere and
straightforward in content and appearance that it's hard to
imagine very many “too-cool-for-school” youths
tuning in, but its presence on cable television among so many
channels of senseless entertainment ensures there's a better
option for them out there. Not only that, Link's presence in tandem
with Current TV may signal a new chapter in television history—one that,
as Al Gore is hoping, will emulate the world wide web in giving the
power of the media to the people.