Sun News Network reportedly going off air
Branded itself ‘alternative’ to TV news in 2011
After a tumultuous four-year run, media reports Thursday night said Sun News Network was set to go off the air early Friday morning, putting 200 people out of work.
The struggling channel’s future has been uncertain for some weeks as it negotiated a possible acquisition by Zoomer-Media. Thursday night, however, reports began emerging from Sun News’ Toronto headquarters that the channel had only hours to live.
Many employees had yet to hear an official word from management even after media began to report Thursday the channel would go dark Friday.
One employee scheduled to start in the early hours of Friday said he didn’t know whether to go into work or if he could even get into the building. He described a frantic series of confused messages, emails and texts flying between employees.
Even middle managers expressed bewilderment that no official word had landed.
Nevertheless, after weeks of uncertainty, the news did not come as a shock to many.
Earlier this week a former employee said they “were surprised the lights were still on.” Numerous others said they knew the end was coming, and that it was a question of “when” not “if.”
According to reports by rival network CTV, Sun News will shut down permanently at 5 a.m. Friday. As of press time, however, the channel — and its various social media accounts — were broadcasting normally.
Owned by Quebecor Media, Sun News first went on the air on April 18, 2011, touting itself as an “unapologetically patriotic” alternative to existing Canadian TV news.
“Canadian TV news today is narrow, complacent and politically correct,” Kory Teneycke, vice-president of development for Quebecor Media, said at a 2010 press conference announcing the network’s creation.
Sun News has struggled to retain viewers, and in 2013 its application to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for mandatory carriage was denied. In 2012, the network was the exclusive broadcaster for the charity boxing fight between Justin Trudeau and then-Senator Patrick Brazeau.
Two years later, Mr. Trudeau would briefly boycott the network after an on-air rant in which host Ezra Levant slammed the Liberal leader’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.
At the height of the Rob Ford scandal, Sun News briefly gave then-Mayor Rob Ford his own show. Known as Ford Nation, the program broke network records by attracting more than 200,000 viewers — but was cancelled soon after its premiere due to what were described as logistical complications.
Although Sun News never turned a profit, its fate became particularly shaky last October when Postmedia Inc. (parent company for the National Post) announced plans to buy Quebecor’s English-language newspaper holdings — a critical source for Sun News content.
Early this year, rumours swirled the network would be sold to Zoomer-Media Ltd., but according to Toronto’s Canadaland podcast, negotiations broke down over the issue of severance packages for Sun executives.