Cenk Uygur and the Young Turks follow Keith Olbermann to Current TV, which looks like a win all around

Current TV's caption for the clip (yes, it's a clip!): Current TV and Cenk Uygur are launching an original TV version of The Young Turks, which has become the world's largest online news show. Uygur's uniquely progressive and topical commentary about politics and pop culture will air each weeknight at 7/6c.

by Ken

When Cenk Uygur (of the Young Turks) had his parting of the ways with MSNBC, declining to take what was apparently a pretty decent amount of money for doing not much of anything, or much of interest to him -- perhaps most of all, it would have been for being a good soldier and going quietly.

The problem, you'll recall, was emphatically not Cenk's ratings, which were pretty good and improving quite dramatically once he got the idea of shaking off as best he could the nattering "suggestions" coming from above and as much as possible doing the damned show the way he thought it should be done. No, the problem was that he just didn't fit in with a media establishment whose overriding concern, it appears, is protecting its own, "its own" including the pols those media are supposed to be covering. And Cenk didn't have a chance to develop a base of his own, as Keith Olbermann had done and Rachel Maddow did with amazing rapidity, with which to hold off the management snipers; he didn't even have the benefit of a contract. I found Cenk's explanation at the time (see the above link) quite convincing, and was convinced -- and remained convinced -- that he acted with extraordinary honor for someone whose interest wasn't self-promotion but bringing the kind of uncompromised political reality to basic cable.

Of course even the seemingly entrenched position Keith Olbermann had developed at MSNBC didn't protect him at the end from the wearing down of management pressure to play nice with its pol-pals. And with Keith's reemergence on Al Gore's Current TV, a number of people wondered at the time of Cenk's departure from MSNBC whether there might be a new TV home open to him. And now it's happening. On Tuesday Current TV announced that The Young Turks are coming to the hour before Countdown with Keith Olbermann, with a third nightly program expected to announce "in the near future."

The AP's Frazier Moore reported:

"Cenk has really demonstrated a unique talent for translating complex daily events into a narrative context that reveals deeper meanings and engages his audience," Current chairman Al Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press, "and he has connected, in particular, with a young demographic interested in what's going on in the world." . . .


"I have no interest in doing a pro-Establishment show," Uygur said, "and that's not what I'll be doing at Current." . . .


Gore drew a contrast -- and not for the first time -- between Current and its rival networks owned by large conglomerates. (MSNBC is controlled by Comcast Corp.)

"We're independent," Gore said, "not just in spirit and in tone, but, more importantly, in reality."

Gore called himself "a big fan" of Uygur's MSNBC show, saying, "He demonstrated that his phenomenal success on the Web translates easily and well into the television format." . . .


Current President David Bohrman spoke of using "The Young Turks" as a way to develop new connections between online and TV.

"We can do that with Cenk and his passionate followers who are online now," said Bohrman.

He made a distinction between the show Uygur hosted on MSNBC and his upcoming Current program.

"We'll be bringing the Turks as well as Cenk," Bohrman said. "The group, with its free-wheeling dynamic, isn't really the Cenk you saw on MSNBC."

The time frame for The Young Turks on Current is "by year-end."

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