If former vice president Al Gore's all-news channel comes off as he hopes, it will be the talk of the hip, under-25 set, not a liberal answer to Fox News.
"Liberal TV is dead on arrival," an adviser to the project told Advertising Age magazine. "You just can't do it."
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Gore is leading a team of investors who are just two weeks away from striking a deal with Vivendi Universal Entertainment to acquire Canadian-based cable network Newsworld International for about $70 million, Advertising Age reported.
The adviser told the trade publication the proposed network will look like a synthesis of CNN and MTV, positioning itself as "a professional news operation reaching an aware, younger, hipper audience."
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That approach is more likely to draw advertisers wary of a network identified with a particular political party, the magazine said.
"The question is whether TV is the way young people will get their news or whether it will come to them over the Internet, on some form of PDA with just headlines, scores, stock market and breaking news," Aaron Cohen, executive vice president and director of broadcast at Horizon Media, told Advertising Age.
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"If you want to talk to young people, that's where you go," he continued. "They haven't grown up to be news viewers yet."
Cohen said in order to attract that audience, the network would "have to have some truly unique personalities, a unique skew on the news, lifestyle stuff."
However, some observers think Gore's association with the network inevitably will brand it as a partisan, Democratic Party operation.
"The problem with being associated as liberal is that they wouldn't be going in a direction that advertisers are really interested in," Paul Rittenberg, senior VP-advertising and market research for Fox News, told Advertising Age.
"We don't get business for being conservative, we get business because the ratings are good and we believe that we're fair," he said. "If you go out and say that you are a liberal network, you are cutting your potential audience and certainly your potential advertising pool, right off the bat. "
