One of Ours

..."I wish they would throw caution to the wind and call themselves liberal, " Alterman said. "If you look at (the liberals on) the best-seller list of the past year, that's enough people to make a cable station work. ... I don't get why they think going after an incredibly crowded (youth) market would work, when they could have a market all to themselves."

Cable industry analyst Gary Arlen said the crowded marketplace made it difficult for any channel not owned by a conglomerate to get picked up by a local cable system.

"The problem is, cable is inundated with ideas for specialized channels...It's a matter of the cable operators -- and there's only a handful, like Comcast, Adelphia, Charter and Time Warner -- that decide what goes on their channels."

And those operators may not have any love for Gore. As a U.S. senator from Tennessee, Gore helped impose cable regulation in the Cable Act of 1992, according to John Higgins, deputy editor of Broadcasting and Cable magazine.

"I can't imagine a guy on earth who's going to have a more difficult time securing carriage from these cable operators than Al Gore," Higgins said. "He cost these guys multiple billions of dollars back in the day."...