January 3, 2013 – News network al-Jazeera agreed to purchase Current TV, the current affairs channel partly owned by Al Gore, seeking to boost its presence in American television.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but a person familiar with the matter said al-Jazeera paid a few hundred million dollars for Current TV. The network, which was co-founded by Mr. Gore and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt in 2005, has recently been struggling with low ratings.
Al-Jazeera, which is owned by the government of Qatar, became famous in the U.S. about a decade ago when its Arabic-language outlet aired videos of Osama bin Laden in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Since then the English-language version of the channel, which is available online in the U.S. and on TV in a few cities, has gained plaudits for its international coverage.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal