Better in their words…

Of course, The Left will not attach one of their own.
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As with the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, let’s hope both sides lose.

Al Gore sued Al Jazeera, saying it still owes him $65 million from the sale two years ago of Mr. Gore’s unwatched liberal cable channel for $500 million. Al Jazeera says it’s rightfully holding back monies left in escrow against breaches of contract by Mr. Gore’s Current TV when he was still in charge.

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Business World Columnist Holman Jenkins Jr. on the former Vice President’s lawsuit against the Qatar-backed television channel. Photo: Getty Images

What breaches? We don’t know because the lawsuit has been sealed, not unusual in cable disputes. But Current TV during its short heyday was known to be constantly flirting with violating minimum viewership requirements under its unusually lucrative contracts with cable operators. Almost as soon as its sale was announced, Al Jazeera found itself in disputes with Time Warner Cable, AT&T and DirecTV, all of which cited “contractual breaches” by the previous owner Current TV.

What’s really interesting, though, is the extent to which all parties, including the cable operators and Al Jazeera, have sought to keep these records sealed to hide Mr. Gore’s dealings with the cable operators. And no wonder: It’s clearer than ever that Current TV’s carriage rights, the main assets that it sold to Al Jazeera for $500 million, were a gift of the cable industry and provided a windfall to Mr. Gore. He’s personally believed to have cleared $70 million. And let’s not forget that $70 million is oil money from Qatar, whose ruling family out of another pocket is believed to subsidize Hamas and other Islamic radical groups.

Not that you would guess Mr. Gore has anything to be embarrassed about. His celebrity lawyer David Boies insists Mr. Gore is ready for a full and complete airing. Said Mr. Boies: “If it thinks this is an ordinary commercial dispute, then Al Jazeera America should be willing to allow the entire complaint to be made public.”

Uh huh. This is likely a bluff, not least because both parties, Mr. Gore included, have insisted on redactions in the publicly available version of the lawsuit. And Mr. Gore’s lawyers would have watched closely a just-settled lawsuit between Al Jazeera and AT&T, a case that demonstrated Al Jazeera’s extreme publicity-squeamishness. Mr. Gore undoubtedly is looking to use that squeamishness as leverage to settle his own case without undue public disclosure.

A quick recap: Most of the details of its AT&T fight remain under wraps, but Al Jazeera accused the TV distributor of dropping its channel to avoid offending Republican viewers in Texas. Al Jazeera also implied that AT&T had only been appeasing Al Gore by running Current TV.

In turn, AT&T alleged unspecified contract violations under Current TV’s ownership, likely regarding minimum viewership levels.

But here’s the noteworthy part: The parties almost immediately stopped fighting each other in order to fight efforts by the national media, including the Associated Press, Bloomberg News and Dow Jones, to pry open the record. When the Delaware Supreme Court ruled for the news organizations on May 30, AT&T and Al Jazeera quickly settled their own dispute. Al Jazeera turned full attention to quashing any disclosures about what the puzzled judge in the case called “a stale deal with a defunct network,” namely AT&T’s previous dealings with Current TV.

Nobody, it seems, has much appetite for exposing the degree to which short-lived Current TV had become a gratuitous bestowal of wealth on Mr. Gore by cable operators.

Mr. Gore likes to say “our democracy has been hacked by big money,” but he has done some hacking himself in his many rent-seeking activities. His Current TV payday, partly at the expense of the Qataris, partly at the expense of U.S. cable subscribers and shareholders, must be especially piquant to Americans exhausted by Mr. Gore’s incessant moralizing.

What would be nice to know, and what a full airing of the legal record might show, is at what point Current stopped being a sincere experiment in liberal news and entertainment. At what point did it morph into a scheme to shake down TV distributors and flip the carriage rights for what BusinessWeek estimates was $450 million in profit to Mr. Gore and partners.

Alas, we’re not likely to get much satisfaction as a result of Al Gore vs. Al Jazeera, since both parties have a clear motive to settle before there’s a record for the media to pick over. Our hope still rests with the effort by media lawyers to break open the record in the now-settled AT&T-Al Jazeera case.

Holman Jenkins: Al Gore v. Al Jazeera v. the Truth – WSJ.