The whole thing is risible, and it's shocking that no one's calling them on it. Well, there's Brioux, and the slightly less fulminated Howard Bernstein, but like most media stories in the Great White North, this one's being allowed to waft hither and thither without much of a reality check.
As Howard put it:
So far very few right wing media organizations have succeeded in Canada. The National Post can barely give their newspaper away. Alberta Report faded away. Sun Newspapers (owned by Quebecor) have been losing money and laying off staff for two years. So where is the market? It might be the talk radio crowd. They seem to gravitate to the wild right but every poll of their listeners has shown them to be older, lower income and lower educated. Not the crowd that the advertisers are looking for.
The bottom line for me is that the Canadians I know, even the very conservative ones, tend to be more moderate in their ideas and their expectations. In the land of “sorry” I am not sure that media crazies will be a welcome addition. Quebecor’s track record for picking winners in English Canada is a poor one. I expect we are getting our shorts in a knot prematurely.
The fact is that even in Canada's fractured parliamentary landscape, 4 out of 5 parties that people vote for consistently are left of BOTH the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States. Break down the, oh, be nice and call it 40% of the populace that would EVER watch this news channel (very few of whom are already watching FOX News -- the channel does hash tags here) and how many are non-old angry white guys who advertisers don't care about?
Brioux busts the Category 1 thing wide open, and points out the inconvenient truth that an effective news channel requires money, which is something that Quebecor is allergic to spending. Oh, and let's go there again: they have failed at EVERY SINGLE THING they've tried to put on the air in English Canada.
Mondoville also broke down an interesting point that if this was a viable alternative, there's at least five cable channels on the air right now that would have tried it already.
Kory Tendollarshoes is sure entertaining -- and I'd love to see some livening up of news panels & coverage in this country. And lets hope that the spectre of this never gonna hunt dog might do it.
But wow. The day Canadians open their cable bills and read that they have to pay a dollar a month more for a third national all-news channel -- and this one's like FOX news? Oh man, I'd hate to be manning the phones that day.
This is a supremely silly story. It's not even 'truthy.' You'd have to be a brain-dead idiot with no understanding of either the country you live in, the media landscape or the fundamentals of business to even entertain it as a viable notion. Can we all just stop with the handwringing and move on?
4 rumbles:
What ever happened to that Canadian porn channel? Northern Peaks?
I don't know all that's involved in making a new channel or how often there's announcements like this that never go anywhere.
Hey, the left have their plurality of news channels here... why can't the right get one? The vast majority of Canadians are muddled middle but our media class has far more nuts on the left than creeps on the right so our version of Fox News would look like MSNBC.
So don't worry, we are in no danger of any actual right wing news services in Canada to balance out the left.
Now imagine my dysphoria when contemplating the likelihood of a news service that champions both free minds and free markets?
Clint, such is the twistedness of that non-hunting dog that it resembles more of a rat.
But the right-lazy rhetoric of the "liberal media" just isn't borne out here. (It's not really borne out in the USA either, but we'll leave that aside for a moment.)
The most recent study of the CBC, which the Little Green Footballs crowd would probably agree was the most "lefty", showed that on balance, the CBC was...ta da ... on balance. Stories critical of the Conservative POV were not egregiously out of whack and entirely within the purview of being more critical of the party in power, because they are in power.
Ask Paul Martin how much he appreciated the "lefty" CBC during the sponsorship scandal and see how far you get.
As the man said, "you're entitled to your opinion. you are not entitled to your own facts."
FOX News elides the latter within every broadcast. You have Shep Smith every once in a while doing a mea culpa for just how biased they are, but otherwise, nope.
Meanwhile, here, the political commentator for CTV for years was Puffy Mike, Current Conservative Senator. Pam Wallin, Conservative Senator... talk Radio swings right as much here as in the USA -- just not as nuttily or unhinged.
You can bleat all you want - but the fact is that the "lefty bias" in the media (concentrated more than anywhere in the world and held by the most pro-business of corporate interests) is a chimera.
Even the Toronto Star doesn't bleed as red as it used to. You simply don't have a case here.
Hey, I don't have a dog in this particular hunt. I'm sure that the right honestly thinks that Fox News is fair and balanced, just like the left honestly thinks that the CBC is fair and balanced... and they can both bring out a pile of studies and statistics that show exactly that.
I'd say they're both unbalanced and, although physiologically inaccurate, it is philosophically appropriate to use the old saying - fish don't see the water they swim in.
I am just as biased. As a libertarian I look at Reason Magazine and I can't see where it isn't a balanced source of news... and I'm sure that you and Anne Coulter would agree with each other that I was wrong.
Instead of a media concentration in corporate behemoths leading to micromanaging a pro-business bias, I see it leading to a focused self interest. They will push or quash stories that can effect them directly but they don't give a damn what else the news says as long as it is making money. Unless it is about them, it is as unimportant to them as what dramas are on Slice or Space.
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