Former Vice President Al Gore, whose early work promoting the world wide web led to jokes he "invented" the internet, is now predicting the death of TV news at the hand of online sites.
Gore, under fire for selling his lackluster Current TV to Al-Jazeera for $500 million, said that the internet will replace TV news because network and cable shows have become a joke and, worse, are undermining American democracy.
"We are going to see the internet take over from TV in the same way TV took over from newspapers and the sooner the better," he said while addressing students at the Clinton School of Public Service last month.
"The other morning I turned on the one of the news programs on a weekday, something happened in Europe that I wanted to know about and they had a story about some young man who had been hiccupping for 64 weeks," he said to laughs in Little Rock, Ark.
"Our democracy is kind of hollowed out when they lose the plot, when the news organizations get confused about the difference between news and entertainment," he added.
Gore was at the school to promote his climate change initiative, which now includes a demand to shrink families.
"Population explosion in the world is for real," Gore said.
His goal: make birth control universally available to let women around the world decide how many and when to have kids. "Make fertility management available everywhere you can so that women can decide how many children to have and what the spacing of those children is," said Gore.
