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Keith Olbermann’s public flameout last week shed light on his former employer, and otherwise ignorable cable station called Current TV. His firing got me to poke around a bit on the channel and try to understand why the hell it exists.

Talk about a super-dooper pedigree. Current TV was founded in 2005 by Al Gore as an outcome of his disenchantment with U.S. Presidential election coverage (he’d not fared so well in the 2000 results, as you may recall). He teamed up with Joel Hyatt, a rich democrat who’d earned his millions offering retail legal services on TV in the 70s and 80s, and the channel was launched to be an “independent voice” in news. Independent is what democrats and fellow left-leaning folks call themselves, usually to differentiate themselves from conservatives who are clearly biased.

With oodles of cash in hand, Current got hoity-toity brand design firm Wollff Olins to design its logo, and bought famous names and completed programs to fill its airtime. Olbermann was perhaps the priciest, pulling a Howard Stern-like move and signing a $50 million/5 year deal). He was fired for shirking his duties and other unspecified sins, though Olbermann is fighting back and is rumored to have been planning his exit for some time now.

The thing is, Olbermann wasn’t and isn’t Current TV’s problem. The problem is that nobody watches it. Its ratings are so low that Time Warner cable is rumored to be considering dropping it altogether, since you know there are so many other great cable ideas vying for that limited bandwidth.

Sure, it has intelligent celebs hosting some shows: Jennifer Granholm and Stephanie Miller are great; Bill Press is pleasantly redundant; Eliot Spitzer is still a horrible mess, though. And some of its shows are fun, like “This American Life.”

But the station offers no compelling reasons to drive repeat, committed viewership. It has no discernable POV...other than avoiding overtly embracing the liberal badge. It promotes no headlines or “must have” info. It’s lost on the dial, and the picture is all grainy like it’s a college production. These are the causes of its ratings problem. Spitzer, who replaced Olbermann, got 47,000 viewers to his first shows. That’s less than half the attendance at a single Ohio State football game.

In other words, Current TV stinks, in spite of its arguably noble intentions. Here are three thought-starters on what it could do to fix things:

  • Embrace a POV -- Enough with the faux neutrality. We know there’s no such thing anymore, and that there never was. Worse, even if you assiduously avoid having a POV (which is impossible), you’ll still get tagged with one, or many, depending on who loves or hates you. So every indicator suggests that Current should take a side...perhaps many sides, depending on issues...and then own them. Here’s one idea: how about becoming Global Climate Change Television? Dedicate a staff and at least one show to an ongoing debunking of the latest attacks on climate change science? There could be a steady stream of materials produced for use by other news outlets, not to mention schools. Ditto for a POV on women’s rights in America, or global terrorism. Pick a point, support it incessantly, and I bet the viewers will flock to it/them.
  • Create Headlines -- I’m sorry, but the news business was built on sensationalism, not any sense of reportorial veracity, and producing valuable, good stuff is kinda pointless if nobody knows it exists. Headlines are doorways...triggers to capture interest. So what the primary headline that I get when I look at Current TV’s wash of programming on its website? Nada. Lots of stuff, none of it must-see. Where’s the daily (or hourly) headline promoting something upcoming or just broadcast? If you’re not making waves, you’re not making news.
  • Promote Location & Time -- Being Channel X15748 on the controller shouldn’t matter but it does. Finding Current TV on my local provider proved a really arduous task, so I’d start by putting a huge find us widget on the home page. Then I’d go to town promoting the idea that its programs should be DVR’d or otherwise captured for asynchronous viewing. The world has enough programming and opinions are pretty common, whether on cable TV, talk radio, or splattered across the blogosphere. Current TV should make it easy for people to not miss its can’t-miss programming.

I think Current TV and Oprah's OWN had a lot in common: channels founded by smart rich people who think their successdoing one thing (politics, lawyering, talkshow hosting) makes them expert at pretty much anything. I mean, how hard could it be to run a television station anyway?

Real hard. Current TV has lots of work ahead of it.