AlterNet: MediaCulture: Al Gore Gets Down: "Reactions were lukewarm at best. 'It's the same references you see on any other channel,' said 26-year-old activist Julian Davis. 'When did Google become alternative media?' asked 22-year-old filmmaker Jennie Heinlein.

Comments like these suggest that what Current has become is quite different from the vision Gore and his partner, Joel Hyatt, started with. What began as an effort to challenge Rupert Murdoch and the right-wing domination of the corporate media has transformed into a business proposition to lure a youth audience with lofty rhetoric, new technology and pop-culture content. Gore and Hyatt didn't have TV experience, so they ceded creative control to industry people who did. Along the way, 'democratizing' the media--their buzzword from the get-go, which they described as giving space to ordinary young people--became more important than politics or elevating television's dismal content. What emerges on Aug. 1, Current's launch date, could resemble an interactive grad-school version of MTV. Current may still improve youth television and usher in a wave of new technology, but it isn't likely to change the media, or the world. 'Less and less they're trying to run a company with a social mission,' says Orville Schell, dean of the Berkeley School of Journalism and a member of Current's board of directors. 'They want something that's new and interesting and economically viable.'"

(Via AlterNet.)