Why Did 'Green Week' Go Out With Travelogue Whimper?

"Green Week" at "Today" came in with an Al Gore roar but went out with a travelogue whimper. What happened?

View video [from MSNBC site] here.

On Monday, "Today" kicked off Green Week with an Al Gore interview in which he proclaimed there was no room for dissenting voices on global warming. Over at MSNBC the same day, an NBC environmental "correspondent" urged viewers to vote for candidates with an environmentalist agenda.

But this morning, "Green Week" at "Today" went out on a mysteriously innocuous note. Gone, at least during the crucial first-half hour, was the environmentalist crusading, replaced by little more than a travelogue. Instead of global warming, the focus was Ann Curry's personal accomplishment in Antarctica [note the screen graphic].

The only recycling was that of footage broadcast earlier in the week of Ann's excellent adventure. The screencap shows the crew back in the studio giving Ann a standing 'O' yesterday as she excitedly gave them the news of her landing at the South Pole. The closest the segment came to the "Green Week" theme was a fleeting reference to the fact that a new station being built at the South Pole would contain facilities for climate-change research.

So what happened? What caused NBC, as it would appear, to retract its environmentalist claws? Could some of the honchos actually have been embarrassed by the over-the-top tone? Were they swamped by rising sea levels of viewer discontent? Did the Federal Election Commission inform NBC that it was on the verge of classifying the network's 150 hours of Green Week programming a contribution-in-kind to the DNC?

Keeping our ears, and inbox, open . . .