A good rule of thumb when hiring someone for your business is to exclude people who’ve pissed off your customers in the past.

If only Current TV had remembered that when they brought Al Gore aboard as Chairman.

According to SF Weekly, Gore’s cable channel, San Franciso-based Current TV, is having a hard time getting distribution on major cable systems. Typically, cable channels sell rights to their programming stream to giant distributors like Time Warner, DirecTV, Comcast, and the like, who bundle it with other channels, mark it up, and sell it to consumers. But that’s not working for Current, and the biggest problem may be … Al Gore:

… it’s a tough sell for any channel not owned by a media conglomerate to break onto TV screens. But that may be especially true for Current, precisely because its chairman is Gore, observers say. As a U.S. senator, Gore helped push the Cable Act of 1992, which cost the industry many millions of dollars by restricting how cable operators charge consumers and earned him the scorn of some of the same executives whose favor he now needs to help jump-start his fledgling cable enterprise.

“So far I would say it looks like payback time,” says cable industry consultant Gary Arlen, a reference to Gore’s apparent slow going in winning many converts within the cable sphere. “People in this industry have exceedingly long memories.”

Gore has taken to holding combined outdoor rallies / free concerts outside Comcast HQ in Philadelphia. We’re pretty sure that unless the audience was all Neilsen participants, Comcast could care less.

All this is bad news for participants in California public employee pension plans, who through a bit of Democratic old-boy dealmaking have their money invested in Current. The same group of insiders seems to have thought Gore was a great choice as Chairman.

H/t: Rosenblog

Technorati Tags: 2008 Election, Current, Current TV, Gore, Al Gore, Yucaipa

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 2:39 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Election 2008 Live Team Coverage!, California Schemin', How Not To Succeed In Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.