I don't really like Mother Jones, but the answer here seems pretty obvious -- unless Al Jazeera America takes a significant amount of viewership from big networks, they're not going to induce much change.

And my limited experience with today's admittedly complex media environment leads me to the assumption that, no, spending thirty minutes covering climate change is not going to woo away a typical CNN watcher.

Why focus on climate change? Al Jazeera should be concerned about changing the way news networks discuss topics entirely, not just this isolated story.

There is too much forced drama in television news, like the typical "Watch ---- news at 9 to see if your child will die from a toy you might have in your house". I haven't seen any of the new Al Jazeera programming but I did see their four minute promo trailer for the network and it looked to me like the same kind of stuff. The narrator to that teaser sounded like he was doing a michael bay trailer and the news anchors had plastic smiles like all the other news channels.

That isn't to say I don't have hope though. Anything that is better than the methods which current networks employ is a step forward.

It's called 'Al Jazeera America'. No one who makes a point of watching it disagrees with them one iota on climate change - or for that matter, much of anything else.

No.

there should be a filter against submissions that are questions but don't include "Ask HN" in the title

I'm tired of all these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines