Could Fox News North be awesome? Opinions differ
One thing is certain, based on the press conference that Quebecor head honcho Pierre-Karl Peladeau and Kory Teneycke held downtown yesterday: the Sun News plan is quite real. If it gets regulatory approval, it will be up and running next January. Apart from that, opinions differ. Old-school journos like Don Newman are lamenting that a brash, upstart news channel is “the absolute last thing this country needs,” and left-wing voices all over the Canadian media are worrying about what it will mean for the nation’s politics. Teneycke himself believes that the network will be “unapologetically patriotic. We will offer the type of raw debate that Canadians only find today in coffee shops and around the dinner table. Sun News will be controversially Canadian.”
Chris Selley of the National Post, a paper that was once a brash, conservative upstart, agrees:
“Controversially Canadian” — good line. And I imagine that schpiel is enough to bring a good number of Canadians to their feet in applause all on its own. There really is a lot of smug, condescending, irrelevant and politically correct journalism out there, and there really are a lot of people who hate it.
Of course, Selley also notes that Sun Media hasn’t exactly won the ground war with its newspapers. Nevertheless, he comes away excited. And no wonder: nothing quite says “shaking up the Canadian media landscape” like holding a press conference in downtown Toronto and bashing “political correctness” and the CBC, something we’re pretty sure has never been done before.
• Sun News may offer needed jolt [National Post] • ‘Straight talk’ Sun TV News coming soon [Toronto Sun]
