Eye View 

by David Charbonneau

Harper TV won't be answer to 'irrelevant' news coverage
 

 

July 9, 2010



Sun TV hopes to become Canada's first right-wing news channel but first it has to find an audience. That's going to be a problem.

Fox News in the U.S. attracts a large audience who find angry rants entertaining but I wonder if there are sufficient cantankerous Canadians to make the channel commercially viable? Sun TV is betting that enough of us enjoy name-calling to make "Fox News North" successful.

It's going to take more than a few angry viewers. Anger TV, like any other channel, depends on advertising revenue. Fox News is successful, not because the drivel dished out by Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck with their predictable attacks on Barack Hussein Obama as a Hitlerite-Commie-Kenyan-Muslim who is also black and not an American anyway. What makes the network viable is that those same viewers who enjoy frothing, rabid insults also have money to spend on advertisers' products.

Prime Minister Harper's former advisor, Kory Teneycke, has been beating the drum in hopes of stirring up some right-wing fervor. He's the vice-president of Sun TV. At the station's launch Teneycke derided the competition, particularly the CBC, as "smug, condescending, and often irrelevant." He apparently doesn't mind being two-faced: he was previously employed by CBC as a pundit.

Teneycke's criticism of our public broadcaster hard to swallow when the only way that his channel can survive is to exploit a loophole in broadcasting regulations. Without a Category 1 license, he won't have enough viewers. A Category 1 license would force cable companies to carry his channel but the CRTC has said it won't grant such licenses anytime soon. So, in order to evade regulations, he hopes that the CRTC will allow trade of their over-the-air station in Ontario for Category 1 and secure "must carry" status; exchange their money-losing station in Ontario for a big cable audience.

The media lobby group, Openmedia.ca, is crying foul. Jesse Betteridge worries that if the CRTC grants "must carry" licenses to financially strapped stations such as Sun TV, then others will want the same treatment. Worse, local stations stop broadcasting local TV. "Despite the ideological concerns that are arising about Sun TV News, the decision to convert a local station to a more lucrative format is, more than anything, a desperate cop-out for an unprofitable broadcaster." It would be one more blow to local TV.





 

 Despite what Teneycke says, Sun TV will likely represent a narrow range of opinion. As Harper's former director of communications, it will become a mouthpiece of the PM.

We don't need another TV channel that wallows in vitriolic rancor. What we need is more in-depth investigative reporting, something that is lacking in as corporate Canadian media giants such as Canwest Global crumple. We need information now that the world is undergoing economic and environmental decline, yet business models guarantee the opposite.

News coverage has declined during the current recession according to the Pew Research Center. In their annual State of the News Media report, coverage of international events by American media fell by about 40 percent. The internet has increased the potential spread of news but declining ad revenues means fewer reporters will recount the news. We are more connected than ever at a time when accurate and comprehensive world news is disappearing.

A third alternative to public and corporate-run media is a non-profit channel financed by someone with deep pockets. Such an alternative is Al Jazeera TV which was started by the Emir of Qatar as the first 24 hour news channel in the Arab world in 1996. Since then, Al Jazeera has built its name on opposing the status quo. Tony Burman, former news chief of CBC Television, is so enthused that he has joined the AJE team. "Al Jazeera," says investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, "has broken the West's monopoly on how the world views conflicts in the Middle East and beyond."

Kamloopsians can see what 200 million households in 100 countries worldwide now enjoy. Shaw cable is giving a free preview of Al Jazeera on digital channel 175 until August 31.

I would prefer a properly funded public broadcaster like the CBC but declining revenues from the Harper government make that unlikely. And the prospect of Harper TV doesn't turn me on. Perhaps Al Jazeera can open a window on the world that has remained in the dark for too long.
 



 David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca
 





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