Sun News begging CRTC for more eyeballs
The spectacle of Fox News North, a.k.a. Sun News, begging for “mandatory carriage” from the CRTC this week — Canadians must pay for it and it must be top-tier in basic cable packages — is good fun.
It’s like bear-baiting, except that for once the bear is Sun News and not the unfortunate decent guest — like the great artist Margie Gillis — who has wandered into an interview without expecting to be savaged by animals with an unreasonable dislike of modern dance troupes.
But Sun’s Krista Erickson has left the country, and Sun News has a whole new narrative. Buckets of homegrown programming! Feds must decide, not the icky market forces that Sun has always championed! Make viewers pay us, just for five years!
At the hearing in Gatineau, Sun was facing CRTC chairman JeanPierre Blais, an elegant Quebecker infinitely courteous in both languages. Blais has spent his career immersed in the legal and regulatory world of copyright, broadcasting and digital technology. It is a specialist trade. These people probably have their own bar.
And then there was Sun News. Two worlds collided. Blais had an air of polite amusement; Sun VP Kory Teneycke, formerly Stephen Harper’s spokesman, seemed pinned to an invisible wall, suffering from a case of dry-mouth terror that would have embarrassed Marco Rubio. It was like watching a stage play, a drawing room comedy, if Blais were played by Alec Guinness and the Sun boys by a row of canned hams.
I’m not surprised at Teneycke’s alarm. The man represents a channel that planted its flag on hardsleeved, shirt-nosed “build it and they will come.” They haven’t. It is said to be losing $17 million a year and attracts, as he indicated, only “14,000 viewers a night in prime time.” Sun bitterly resents CTV and CBC whose continuing triumph in news clearly hurts.
Sun was also asking for carriage on analog basic as well as digital, something no one ever asks for these days. Teneycke explained that much of its audience are seniors on fixed income, who can’t afford fancy cable. This cleared up one mystery. Who are the Angry Pyjamas demographic? They’re Sun viewers.
At one point, Teneycke said inadvisedly, “It’s very similar to what you would find on Fox.” What’s the difference? “It’s 100-per-cent Canadian content,” Teneycke claimed, also referring to government/common good “socioeconomic factors,” in essence calling Sun a specialty channel for the poor. But this was so socialist I couldn’t follow it.
Fine. Without regulatory assistance, Sun will die. So why won’t people watch it?
I watched a full day of Sun News, which, to my surprise, I do have at home along with, at last count, 554 other channels. “We’re hard news during the day and straight talk at night,” Teneycke told Blais, which was fine with me as there was much hard news, what with sweeping anti-terrorism legislation and some handy arrests.
Except for one YouTube clip, I had never seen Sun News before, not even a still photo of its notorious Ezra Levant, who finally apologized for a racist on-air attack on the Roma people just before the hearings began. I had doubted his corporeal existence. The channel is . . . unusual. I was attempting to answer a basic question that — multiplied by every channel — has bloated your cable bill into a major household expense. Would you pay 18 cents a month for this channel? First, hair. The channel needs a makeover. I don’t object to nice anchor Pat Bolland’s handlebar mustache, a style choice that gives the viewer the odd sensation that the moustache has its own show. But Brian Lilley has hard orange wings coming out of his head. The makeup is dire. Fox hair is hard blond. In contrast, Sun women are doing a coal-black Carly Rae Jepsen. They look as if they’ve been cleaning Victorian chimneys. The lip gloss is extraordinary, easi- ly the equivalent of Bolland’s whiskers. Again, it doesn’t matter. But it’s a look that blares, “We never leave the room, it’s windy out there,” and that’s the problem. Sun does news the way the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni makes a Jack Nicholson movie. Plant one camera in cement and wait for Nicholson/Blais/Sun staff to pass back and forth. There’s almost no straight reporting, only comment. Then there are the ads, which are plentiful but may explain why Sun loses money. I haven’t seen such an odd assortment of cheap since PBS-North Dakota. They sell weird devices: inflatable sprinkler hoses for the obese gardener, “Ruggies” to prevent rug accidents, bowling ball storage hooks, hair- removal heat crystallizers (a man beams as he melts his nipple hair, a woman tackles her forearms) and lower-jaw clamps for snorers. These last are returnable. That can’t be hygienic.
The ads are often foreign, not even semi-Canadianized, complete with accents straight from Baton Rouge and Blackpool. They offer “non-traditional” insurance. They offer berths on a “Freedom Cruise” to Alaska in the company of Levant. Media gave up offering these Voyage of the Damned things years ago. They aren’t profitable.
In a direct contradiction of what Sun promised the CRTC, it does not restrict opinionating to evenings. Sun’s news is infused with blatant commentary all day. Alleged “reporters” tweet opinions and post NRA gun ads on websites. “Jepsens” draw wild conclusions about Muslims from print news as they sit in front of tacky local wallpaper.
Alberta gets cowboys and oil derricks, Vancouver a harbour, Halifax a tattered bookshelf in a closet.
Sun News extrudes pure cheese. There are typos in the crawling newsfeed. They introduce visuals with “take a listen” and say “quite the” all the time.
By 10 a.m., I am tired of Sun News. By noon, I am simply embarrassed. This is TV on a Molvanian level of quality.
“We’re on a relentless pursuit of the truth,” Sun ads say. “We’re just getting started.” But they’re not. If they don’t get mandatory carriage, they’re just finishing. Give us carriage or the puppy dies, Sun is saying, which is quite the business plan.
I have a better idea. Refuse carriage and I’ll pay Sun 18 cents a month in compensation, a Canadian compromise that will leave us all better off. hmallick@thestar.ca