What to write, what to write, what to write...
...yeah, not anything about my life in Manitoba yet, sorry to those of you who were looking for that. Think I need to figure out what my life in Manitoba is before I can write about it.
So instead I'll talk about television. But not in the way I normally talk about television.
You may have heard about "Sun TV News". It's a new all-news network being proposed by Quebecor, owners of a successful French-Canadian media empire and the Sun newspapers, and fronted by former Conservative PR guy Kory Teneycke.
Because Quebecor is known for its right-wing populist leanings, and because Teneycke has openly mused about how Canada needs an equivalent to FOX News, many have jumped to the conclusion that Sun TV News will in fact be that equivalent. Don Newman, the longtime CBC political broadcaster, has done so, for one.
Now, Mr. Newman is a smart man and while I think he comes off as a little blustery and hyperbolic at times in that article, I do agree with his general point. It's okay for news to accidentally create different viewpoints or interpretations of stories, because most news stories do have two or more viewpoints. The problem is when something calls itself "news" and decides to always emphasize the same viewpoint based on ideological predisposition rather than truth value. Having a liberal news channel and a conservative news channel and a socialist news channel is not the good idea that Teneycke suggests it is, because it means that when people disagree on the news, they will be doing so because they understand the same story with three different sets of facts. If the news all comes from organizations striving to be objective without any ulterior motives, people will still disagree, but at least they'll all agree about what they're disagreeing on.
Thus far in the game, Sun TV News has not had a lot of defenders--and that's perhaps to be expected, as how many media types are going to defend somebody who is calling them obsolete? (Teneycke has stated, and if I'm paraphrasing it's not by much, that Canadians care more about the opening of a new Victoria's Secret store than they do about Parliament Hill, and that his network, unlike other Canadian news channels, will talk about what Canadians really want to know.) To me, that sounds like Teneycke is planning for his channel to be more focused on celebrity and water-cooler-du-jour topics--in which case, isn't that already what CP24 is doing?
Actually, when I think about it, there are a lot of parallels between CP24 and Sun TV News. Trying to be "hip" and "engaging" to win an audience, and using a cable news channel to supplement a broadcast station that practically nobody watches. (I mean, how many of you even knew there was a Sun TV station near the beginning of the dial before reading this sentence?) Not to mention that Sun TV News isn't exactly going to be full of household names...their "big hire" thus far has been David Akin, who is a solid journalist, but far from a known commodity outside those political circles Teneycke is claiming he wants no part of.
Really the only defense I've seen of Sun TV News, aside from those mounted by people involved with it in some capacity, came from, of all people, David Haskell (one of my more frequent professors during the past four years), published in a smattering of newspapers across the country. I'm not sure that I agree with the premise that there is a liberal bias in Canadian media to begin with (unless we're accepting the popular-in-Internet-arguments phrase "the truth has a liberal bias"), and even if there is I think it's less about ideology and more about storytelling. A couple years ago, CTV's Kitchener station ran a series of stories on a man who was laid off due to the recession, unable to find a job, and ultimately ended up homeless. The liberal story would be "this poor man! He didn't do anything wrong so he should get assistance and maybe we can help with that!". The conservative story would be "this man needs to claw his way back out of homelessness". It seems pretty obvious that the liberal story, as is almost always the case, is at least the more compelling.
Haskell does have one good point, though. There is generally a noticeable anti-organized religion bias in the mainstream media (Catholics, oddly, seem to get spun in a positive light more often than most other denominations even though their scandals get covered just as quickly). I'm just not so sure that the best way of fixing that bias is a conservative network (which would in turn be followed by a liberal network pushing the "normal" back in the CBC/CTV direction), especially when said network has never said anything about promoting organized religion.
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And for no good reason, some footage of downtown Brantford as it looked in 1992.
--Ryan
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