AS members of the media, we never take pleasure when hard times befall our colleagues in the industry, even competitors.
But we'll make an exception in the case of Sun News Network, which has just been denied mandatory carriage by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on the grounds that it did not meet the criteria required.
The network's executives were applying to the CRTC to force every Canadian with a basic cable package to pay for Sun News, essentially socializing the network's $17-million annual losses while broadcasting a product many Canadians find vile. The irony or hypocrisy of a media outlet that decries socialism asking the regulator to force Canadians to buy their product was apparently lost on them. The company's
executives have said they will shut the channel down if the CRTC did not rule in their favour.
That they report news with a conservative slant isn't their sin. It is the lowbrow, mean spirited, unabashedly biased and, too often, misleading way they do it. The network earned the moniker "Fox News North" even before it went live in 2011.
The CRTC will soon consider whether it should include every TV news channel in its mandatory carriage, and there's a good argument that Canadians shouldn't be forced to purchase any channels in their cable packages.
But for now, we're glad we aren't being forced to subsidize Sun News. It's hard enough getting the news and reporting it accurately and fairly without their boorish voice further tarring the term "mainstream media."
