ThomsonReuters’ Felix Salmon and TNR‘s Rebecca Dana have some fascinating postmortems on Al Jazeera’s $US500 million deal to buy Al Gore’s Current TV. Both authors contend the deal gives Al Jazeera ‘soft power’ access to between 40 to 60 million American households and strengthens Qatar’s negotiation position with US cable television distributors. Each credits Gore with facilitating the final negotiations and providing a premium that likely increased the deal value. The potential gridlock is that US cable television distributors are not Current TV fans; Gore’s network did not have a large audience, and many of its programs are up for contract renewal; and the new Al Jazeera America will be kept separate from Al Jazeera English. However, Qatar’s Emir has the capital to possibly acquire other cable television networks. We’ll see if the Current TV deal suffers from the winners curse . . .