Former US Vice President Al Gore complains about the consolidation of the corporate media but no mention is made how this conflicts with his other loyalty: the Democratic Leadership Council.

First, check out this Gore quote from the Associated Press

Questions of fact that are threatening to wealth and power become questions of power, he said. And so the scientific evidence on global warming — an inconvenient truth for the largest polluters — becomes a question of power, and so they try to censor the information.

Yes, all fine and with the movie title namedrop as well, but when he was in power he was reluctant to challenge large-scale pollution. According to Joshua Frank and leading environmental muckraker Jeffrey St. Clair, Gore supported a free-market approach to handling pollution by supporting NAFTA which helped move big business polluters to Mexico where environmental law is weaker and less frequently enforced than in the US. Gore was placating the DLC, a group he conflicts with when he criticizes a monolithic media.

While Gore makes his claim, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) is running for re-election and getting quite a boost from Time-Warner station NY1 financially—Time Warner has donated $100,000 to her campaign making that corporation the number 6 contributor to her campaign—and in the form of excluding her anti-Iraq-war competition, Jonathan Tasini, from televised debates by setting the bar for inclusion ridiculously high. NY1’s public relations manager, Edward Pachetti, says

The criteria are that a candidate must poll at least five percent (including margin of error) in a recognized independent poll and would need to have spent and/or raised $500,000.

Listen to Tasini and Ralph Nader, who also knows a thing or two about being excluded from televised would-be debates, as they talk about this development in depth on Democracy Now! on Wednesday, August 9, 2006 (Ogg Vorbis or FLAC format). Their discussion starts at 25m26s into the show. Nader points out that any ballot-qualified candidate should be able to participate in any debates. Any modern media player can play these files (scroll down a bit to see the list of operating systems and media players).