Al Gore, BBC win International Emmy Awards
Former Vice President Al Gore won another honour last Monday when he received the Founders Award at the International Emmy Awards, which also gave a top prize to a controversial British television film about the assassination of President George W Bush.
Death of President, which explores the aftermath of Bush's imaginary assassination in Chicago in October 2007, won the International Emmy for best TV movie or miniseries, leading a pack of winners from the United Kingdom and the BBC that dominated the 35th annual awards.
The award was presented moments after Gore accepted his honour, an annual prize that recognised his role in launching Current TV, a cable and satellite network that uses viewer-created content.
Gore, accepting from Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro, said in brief remarks that the future of world democracy "depends to a surprising degree on democratising TV." Current TV was thus born of the idea of connecting the Internet to television, Gore said.
The former vice president, who ran against Bush in 2000 in a disputed election that was decided by a divided US Supreme Court, also used the occasion to lobby on behalf of the environment, saying, "The climate crisis is by far the most serious challenge the human race has ever faced."
Earlier this year Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, and graced the stage at the Academy Awards when the documentary about his lecture tour on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth won the Oscar. He also won a prime-time Emmy for Current TV.
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