By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--January 14, 2016
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Called it. https://t.co/8vRPGiTkDP
— Elliott Schwartz (@elliosch) January 13, 2016
Well, guess what. As always, Hillary was wrong. As the New York Times reports, Al Jazeera America is no more:
The cable news channel Al Jazeera America, which debuted in 2013 to great fanfare when it promised to cover American news soberly and seriously, will be shutting down by the end of April. The move was announced at a companywide meeting on Wednesday. In a memo to the staff, Al Jazeera America’s chief executive, Al Anstey, said the “decision by Al Jazeera America’s board is driven by the fact that our business model is simply not sustainable in light of the economic challenges in the U.S. media marketplace.”If you think that sounds suspiciously like industry shorthand for "nobody watches us," you're right.
Al Jazeera America went on the air in August 2013 after Al Jazeera bought Al Gore’s Current TV for $500 million. It promised to be thoughtful and smart, free of the shouting arguments that have defined cable news in the United States over the last decade. But meaningful viewership never came, with prime-time ratings sometimes struggling to exceed 30,000 viewers.Let's put that in perspective: Last year, MSNBC hit an eight-year low in terms of viewers. Its audience was considered microscopic and most of its primetime offerings were being crushed by reruns of Dukes of Hazzard - a show which was tormenting viewers with a really scary confederate flag. At the time, MSNBC was still managing to attract around 130,000 viewers at any given moment. Given the number of homes that had access to Al Jazeera America, 30,000 sets of eyeballs should have been easy. Heck, they should have been able to get to that number just by counting people whose TVs were stuck on the network because they'd lost their remotes. RIP, Al Jazeera America. We'll never forgive you for taking Current TV from us.
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