Sunstroke: A look into Canada's newest all-news station

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Created on Thursday, 10 March 2011 10:46

by Noah S. Wernikowski

Sun News Network, Canada’s third 24-hour news station, is set to launch in mid-April. The path leading up to its debut has been awry with speculation, fabrications, condemnation and, well, hysteria. First, there was a 2009 New York meeting between Roget Ailes, president of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, the station’s  owner, our Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and the now Sun News front man Kory Teneycke. Next, a high-profile clash between Margaret Atwood and Teneycke, which saw the writer accused of putting her “political agenda ahead of principles and patriotism.” And then there were accusations of Harper bullying the CRTC to advance a licence proposal.

Dramatics aside, deceptive and partisan news not only devastates journalism but also pollutes public discourse, gravely crippling democracy. Although we are yet to see Sun News, its background suggests there is much to be weary of. Fox News has affected the States, and its echo is now threatening Canada.

Fox News was launched in 1996, to a modest 10 million households. Its audience grew steadily, especially during the Bush presidential campaigns and the beginning of the Iraq conflict. Sustained growth has made it the highest rated 24-hour news channel in American since 2002. It now reaches 102 million US households, and has drawn widespread attention and criticism.

Fox News’ entry into the American media landscape marks “one of the most dramatic media shifts in past years,” according to a 2007 study conducted by Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan. The study measured changes in voter behavior where Fox was introduced, contrasted it with areas where it was absent, and concluded that Fox News changes voting patterns. The network both converted Democrats to vote Republican and convinced new or undecided voters to vote Republican. On average, 3 to 8 per cent of Fox’s audience shifted its vote to support the Republican Party.

The Fox News effect is only partially achieved by brazen opinion programs. More subtly, and more dangerously, it’s through the bias of their allegedly objective news programs. Fox News claims impartiality, insisting its news programming is “fair and balanced.” This, according to Steve Rendall, the senior analyst for the American media watchdog organization FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), is a mere pretense.

The bias is evident in Fox’s story selection. Stories that cast a negative light on the left are embraced while others are omitted. For example, “Special Report,” a signature Fox News show, was originally aired to cover the Clinton Sex Scandal while the Bernard Kerik scandal received less airtime. The selection of guests also demonstrates bias. Rendall studied the diversity of guests on “Special Report,” concluding the show’s interview segment favoured Republican over Democratic guests by a ratio of eight to one. “Powerful government elites and corporate elites were all over the guest lists while public interest voices and voices of labour and working people were almost totally invisible,” he said. Finally, he argues, Fox News is imprecise in its facts, in a way which can only be explained as intentional. “If you look at the history of a media outlet’s honest mistakes, they’ll fall in random directions. The mistakes at Fox fall in a direction uniformly beneficial to a right-wing agenda, and more particularly, a Republican agenda,” said Rendall.

Fox News has also gravely reshaped the landscape of American journalism. Historically, accusations of liberalism, socialism, or even communism have kept news outlets weary, explained Rendall. Fox insists that a liberal bias dominates mainstream media, and they only appear conservative by comparison. By pegging the left as unpatriotic and criticizing competitors of being too liberal, Fox has “Producers, reporters, and editors constantly looking over their shoulder,” said Rendall. The effect is that neutral networks, such as the NPR, shift to the right.

Howard Bernstein, long-time Canadian TV producer and author of media analysis blog, Medium Close Up, is disgusted by Fox News and its effects. “I think Fox has done more to create an ignorant electorate in the US than their education system or anything else. And that’s dangerous to journalism and dangerous to democracy.”

However, the fact is that Sun News is not Fox News, and America is not Canada. All comparisons of Sun News to Fox News have been vigorously declined by Sun. Questions of the network’s political leanings have been largely deflected. No one has seen Sun News yet - and Sun Media ignored repeated interview requests - so there is still much speculation. Although the two networks have undeniable similarities, Sun News will have to be judged on its own programming.

The notion that Sun’s combination of news, analysis and opinion programming would be drastically different than other all-news channels was how they backed their Category 1 CRTC licence request. Taglined “Hard News” and “Straight Talk,” the channel will feature news programming in the day. In the evening, similar to Fox News, it will “feature hosts and guests that deliver strong opinions and analysis.” This format is an essential part of Sun TV News; they argue that “Being well informed means more than being exposed to dry news.” The CRTC, however, found the format less groundbreaking and the only granted a Category 2 licence.

Sun News also argues the other stations are “narrow, complacent, and politically correct,” and vows to fill the vacuum with an “unapologetically patriotic” Canadian alternative. This means more right-wing, conservative opinions. “They are saying the rest of the media swings to the left, so diverging opinion has to swing to the right,” said Bernstein.

“They see themselves as balancing the left-wing media in Canada. And, that of course, is another myth,” said Dennis Gruending, former journalist and MP and current Ottawa-based writer and blogger. Postmedia News and Sun Media, the massive newspaper conglomerates that service much of Canada are, if anything, leans conservatively, he explained. Canadian media is in no way liberally biased and by labelling it as leftist and itself as a moderate alternative, Sun News is trying to shift the fulcrum point of Canadian political discussion.

“What concerns me about Sun TV is that the Sun papers are basically eco-chambers for the conservative message and heap scorn on liberal politicians,” said Gruending.

The history of Sun News and its founder’s deep conservative roots go back to 1971’s founding of the Toronto Sun. The morning tabloid sprang up to fill a perceived vacuum left by Toronto’s other papers. Douglas Creighton, one of three founders of the Toronto Sun, explains the paper’s origins in his memoir “Sunburned.”According to the book, there needed to be “A newspaper of opinionated news.” A paper opposed to “the fashionable left.” The paper was successful and established itself as right-leaning.

Sun Media was acquired by Pierre Karl Peladeau and Quebecor Media Inc. in 1998, making Quebecor the largest newspaper conglomerate in Canada. Peladeau, a well-known conservative ideologue, quickly staffed the Sun News project with conservatives. Jason Plotz, formerly of Harper’s PMO, has joined Sun Media’s Parliament Hill bureau as a media monitor. Kory Teneycke, front-man for Sun News is a former director of communication for Harper’s PMO.

Teneycke has also been connected with The Réseau Liberté Québec, or the Quebec Freedom Network. The fledgling RSL, compared to the American Tea Party movement by the Globe and Mail, preaches small government, lower taxes, more free enterprise, and even climatalogical skepticism to a mainly left-leaning Quebec. RSL spokesman, Eric Duhaime, is also an employee of Paladeau and a regular columnist for Quebecor papers. This unhealthy mixing of journalism and political activism troubles Gruending. “It is a bit like Glen Beck helping to organize Tea Party rallies – I just don’t think those lines should be crossed,” he said.

Its conservative background established, the question arises as to what exactly the network will mean for Canadian journalism. “We think it’s going to have a lot of right-wing, or pro-Tory opinion. Which I’m not personally against – I think having opinion from all sides is a good thing – what I worry about, of course, is whether they play fast and loose with the facts the way Fox does in the US,” said Bernstein.

For Bernstein, that Sun News might be strategically inaccurate is unnerving. “If you’ve read SUN newspapers or the newspapers they own in Quebec, they cross the line all the time,” he said. “I suspect Sun News will be a biased station,” Gruending agreed. In January, the CRTC proposed a change to the rules on broadcasting false or misleading news. The change would have allowed stations to knowingly misleading the public, making it infinitely easier for Sun News to be intentionally inaccurate. Although the CRTC has recently indicated they will not move forward on the controversial amendment, Bernstein still questions the CRTC’s competence in monitoring the station. “Will they CRTC look the other way when the rules are broken?” he asked. During his entire career as a television producer, he never felt the CRTC properly enforced their rules for the county’s major stations.

Although concerned, both Bernstein and Gruending believe Canada presents a less fertile atmosphere for punditry. “I don’t think Sun News will go over as well in Canada as Fox does in the States – I think Canadians are better informed and are not as knee-jerk right-wing or left-wing. I think they are much more centrist than Americans are. So, my suspicion is, is that it’s not going to be the big success that Sun hopes for,” said Bernstein.

“They certainly will have a certain type of following,” said Gruending. “Talk radio, which is pretty right-wing, has a certain type of following, its own demographic, and its own sort of limited group that it appeals to. But it certainly isn’t the majority opinion in Canada – Canada is much more liberal/ social democratic in its values.”

Still, Bernstein isn’t ready to dismiss Sun News as innocuous. “I’ve always believed that if you yell loud enough and long enough, it’s amazing how much people will buy whatever it is that you’re yelling, even if it’s not true,” he said.