Biography | Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani — The Current TV Purchase That Opened an American Channel

On 2 January 2013 Al Jazeera Media Network announced that it had acquired Current TV and would launch a United States channel on that distribution.

The press line carried a New York dateline.

The decision sat with the director general's office in Doha.

Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, still in the chair he had taken in September 2011, presented the purchase and the planned American service as a first in the network's sixteen-year life.

The terms were not disclosed.

Contemporary reporting put the price near 500 million dollars.

Current TV, co-founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt in 2005, reached tens of millions of American cable homes and almost none of the ratings that cable news required.

What Al Jazeera bought was the pipe: a slot on American systems that Al Jazeera English had never secured at scale.

The new service would be headquartered in New York.

The network said it would double its United States staff to more than 300 and add bureaus beyond the ones already open in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago.

Al Jazeera America signed on 20 August 2013 from the Manhattan Center, replacing Current on the same systems at 3 p.m. Eastern.

By then he was already out of the director general's office.

The deal itself was his, announced while he still held the chair on Ahmed Bin Ali Street.

The visitor to Wadi Al Sail sees the same headquarters cluster that issued the statement.

Photo: Carlos Duarte, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons