Way to have your employees' back, Al

Al Gore as well as Current TV, his "new media" outfit, have not bothered to comment publicly on the fact that two of their reporters have been convicted and given 12-year sentences for illegal entry into North Korea, nor has the plight of the two women been given a second of coverage on that supposed "news" channel, which has also censored reader comments on their official website and even gone so far as to post guards to keep other news outlets from trying to get more information, according to Arthur Bruzzone of the SF Politics Examiner.

Interestingly, some online commenters to Bruzzone's article point out that the cameraman accompanying the two women at the time of their arrest eluded capture by the North Korean border guards and has been back in the U.S. for some months. Why hasn't Current TV interviewed him publicly in an attempt to get an accurate first-hand account supporting their innocence, and possibly generate more sympathetic coverage for the jailed reporters, if indeed they were in Chinese territory when they were nabbed? Any other major media outlet would take that course of action if it were one of their newspeople behind bars, that's for sure.

Unless the trio were in fact in North Korea, in which case the women are truly screwed, as that country, despite being a dysfunctional shell of a nation run by a madman, is still a sovereign nation with the right to control its borders.

We're not seeing an easy solution to this incident, which is truly unfortunate for Ling and Lee, but the obvious non-coverage by their employer does serve to starkly illustrate the type of selective control of legitimate news stories that Gore and his ilk still in government would prefer the rest of the major liberal media to emulate, if they could only convince them to do so.


UPDATE: We just went to Current's website and did a search for "North Korea". Not one result about their own journalists came up, which only serves to buttress Bruzzone's assertion that they are indeed suppressing legitimate news coverage and commentary over there.

Oh, and for those that argue that Current self-censored at the urging of the State Department in the hopes of reaching a quiet resolution: That tactic, if it was indeed used, didn't seem to help very much, now did it?