Sun News Network shuts down.

I’ve been somewhat out of the loop for a few days, but Friday, I got the shock of my life, when I found out that the owners of Sun News Network had decided to shutter the struggling channel.

Viewing figures were never great, their mix of so-called “Hard News & Straight Talk” was in fact mostly Conservative-leaning propaganda, the same blend and style propagated by Fox News Channel, and they never garnered enough momentum to become an essential channel, a basic cable channel.  They requested basic cable status from the CRTC time and again, and were refused.

But, the polarities of the commentaries online and on social media have been, as usual, at either ends of the scale.  On one side, you have those like the Facebook group that was trying to generate momentum to create a movement to save Sun News.  But just under 700 members, as significant a group as that is in Facebook terms, is never going to be enough to overcome any problems the broadcaster faced.

On the other side, you have those who hated it, like they hate Fox, and were basically cheering its closure, saying things like “good bye and good riddance”, and “Bye Felicia”.

As always in these situations, these are the polar opposites.  Reality is somewhere in between.  But where?

Well, as much as Sun News wants to blame the CRTC for their problems, that’s the wrong thing to do.  UK broadcast history will point to TWW, a station called Television West & Wales in the mid 1960s, who tried to take on the ITA, the regulator at the time, after being told that their licence would not be renewed in 1968, despite the ITA having asked TWW to essentially take over neighbouring company WWN (Wales West & North), which collapsed in 1964.  The ITA had decided to go with a new company called Harlech Television. 

Letters were exchanged between TWW head honcho Lord Derby, and the head of the ITA at the time, both privately, and in the London Times Letters Page.  Such behaviour was never going to go down well, and TWW made a decision to leave the air 6 months early, and sold their studios and airtime to Harlech.

So, taking on the regulator was not a good idea.  What about the programming?

This is one of the most important areas for any broadcaster.  Fall down here, and it’s curtains no matter what else you do.  And unfortunately, they fell down here badly.  And not for the reasons you think either.  It had nothing to do with having shows that had an editorial agenda.  Let’s face facts, every news broadcast has some kind of editorial agenda behind it, so the fact that they had opinion shows with a right wing slant, wasn’t enough of a reason on its own to bring about its downfall. 

They used the positioning statement, “Hard News & Straight Talk”, and whilst there was lots of talk, there was very little real news.  Yes, it had lots of flashy sets, and flashy graphics, but it didn’t really have any reporters doing any beat reporting.  Most of their coverage came from talking heads that they interviewed, and a lot of those had the same kind of editorial bias that Sun News did, so it looked like they were editorialising the news, which they were.  Now they would get some experts in, and unlike Fox, they would treat them with respect, but too many talking heads, and not enough reporters and expert voices, meant that their “Hard News” was more often “Hard to swallow” than real Hard News. 

I’d say the budget was shoestring, but they spent so little, that they actually had change from the shoestring.  If instead of having several different studios for every show, they had had one decent set, that could serve every show, and did enough to give the set a slightly different look for each show, then it would have helped.  They might have then considered putting together bureaux in Vancouver and Ottawa as a minimum, with options to create Bureaux in Montreal, Calgary and Winnipeg.

The other thing that might have contributed to their downfall, was their aggression and their attitude.  The station was basically a clone of Fox News Channel, and that contravenes the Golden Rule of all broadcasting, Be Yourself.  Don’t copy others.  They tried to copy the Fox News Channel style, with flashy graphics, multiple studios, regular talking heads, and a desire to create controversy, and Conservatives in Canada, are very different to the extremist Republicans in America.  And whilst there are a small minority of extreme right wingers in Canada, the prospective audience in a country of over 30 million, compared to a country of over 300 million, was just too small to make such a channel sustainable.

Fox News Channel does such a good job of spreading Conservative propaganda, that they basically are the home of Conservative propaganda worldwide.  Sun’s problem was it was trying to clone that for a Canadian perspective and audience, an audience that understood better than the people producing it, that Sun News wasn’t for Canada.

It’s never a good thing to celebrate the loss of 150 jobs, that’s not good optics.  But, Sun News Network, was never anything to write home about, or indeed, get worked up about, because it never made the impact in the broadcast firmament, that it’s flashy style made it appear to have.

Viewpoint - Conservative media domination

Editorialising The News

I have a confession to make. I would call myself something of a news junkie. I regularly have one of the 24 hour news channels on in the background, and I download lots of news podcasts from different broadcasters all over the world. The reason for this is simple: it gives me a wide variety of different perspectives on the news, and on how the media itself reports the news.

But I do have another motive for my possible over-consumption of news programming. It gives me a better chance to separate the facts of a news item from any unintentional or deliberate bias that might be injected into a story, and also allows me to eliminate the ‘tabloid’ hype and clichés that are used to ‘sell’ you the story. It gives me a purer, more factual perspective on the news, and it has shown up a trend that started in newspapers, but is showing through in broadcasting and the new media.

I call it “Politicising” or “Editorialising” the story. Like so many trends, this one seemed to start in the United States a number of years ago, quite probably around the time when the media regulator there, the Federal Communications Commission, decided to do away with an ‘equal time’ rule, which allowed aggrieved parties equal time to respond. This rule was done away with in 1985, during the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan.

Now let me get one thing straight. You had conservative talk show hosts prior to 1985, and they did not give equal time to all issues, but there was far less difference between perspectives than there is now. But in 1994, the political world in the USA was turned upside down by the election of a Republican Congress, under the political leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrinch Gingrich, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom Delay aka “The Hammer”.

In 1995, this triumvirate of Republican leaders managed to get not only Conservative radio talk show hosts, but Conservative newspaper editors to all speak with one voice rather than many voices, in opposition to the Democratic President, Bill Clinton. Clinton was incredibly popular with both Democrats and Independents, but Republicans hated him, with a greater vengeance than had ever been seen against any Democrat before.

It was around this time that the Republican message about the so-called ‘Liberal Media’ first became really widely known, and even slightly considered to be even possibly accurate. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News Channel to be a conservative news network, as opposed to CNN, which got labelled the Clinton News Network by some conservatives. It was the first time that the news itself was becoming well and truly politicised in the broadcast medium.

Until this time, in broadcast news at least, the news was the news and that was it. You may have had bulletins created for a younger audience for example, but targeting the news with a particular political bias was regarded as an absolute no-no. However, conservatives felt that the mainstream media, or as conservative radio talk show host Rush "Limburger" Limbaugh calls them, the ‘drive-by media’, were not being critical enough of the Clinton administration, hence the idea that the mainstream media had a liberal bias. Of course, few anticipated the story that was going to engulf the news media in 1998.

Before news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Republicans had been so desperate to pin anything on Bill Clinton, that they were practically begging the media, especially Fox News, to throw them even a small bone to gnaw on. But when the story broke in January 1998, both Republicans and the media realised that they hadn’t been given a small bone to gnaw on, but a huge, meaty, 8 course feast to gorge on - and gorge on it they did!

For over a year, the media became more and more divided over the Lewinsky scandal, and whilst Republicans did not get the impeachment that they wanted, the real result of this effort came in 2000, with the most politically divisive election that there had ever been between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W Bush. It ended in the ‘hanging chads’ debacle in Florida, and a win for George W Bush, a win that Fox News had declared on the night, only to have to retract it later the same night.

What had really been happening was that the conservative media had been moving further and further away from the rest of the media. But that seemed to be over, on September 11th 2001.

Almost every media outlet around the world was united in shock and outrage at the deliberate crashing of two planes into the World Trade Center in New York City. This single act managed to do what had hitherto seemed impossible, uniting the conservative and mainstream media in the US. For about 2 years, these two arms of the media would act as one.

However, a new media form, which had been coming together since 1994, would be partially responsible for the re-separation of the conservative and mainstream media: the weblog, aka blog. Bloggers had been around for quite a few years, but in 2002, this new internet media format, which had been used for years as a rebroadcast, and latterly a new broadcast medium, suddenly started to make itself widely known on both the US and world stage.

This new medium has become as politically divided as the rest of the media, and in some ways is still finding its feet. Some proposals to regulate the format, such as a Blogger’s Code Of Conduct, have been regarded by some political bloggers as tantamount to censorship.

Blogging grew from being a text-only medium, to an audio and then video medium. Blogs can be exclusively text, exclusively audio, exclusively video, or any combination of all three. Some bloggers have crossed over into other media, such as Michelle Malkin and Ariana Huffington. But there are many more out there for whom the blog is perhaps as close to fame as they will ever come.

With blogs being liberal, conservative, and all political points in-between, we have seen the development of true ‘liberal media’. Liberal Blogs now sit alongside the liberal talk radio network Air America Radio and Sirius Left on sateliite radio and liberal newspapers as being the real ‘liberal media’. Conservative media is representated by conservative newspapers and blogs, conservative talk radio, and of course, the ever-controversial Fox News Channel.

The rest of the news media, mainly radio news and most TV news, including the public /public-service media, try to maintain going down the political centre, even if they cannot claim to be unbiased. But of course, the politically biased dislike any media that do not agree with them.

There are a number of blogs that attack the public media for not being biased in their direction. Most are politically conservative, but one, surprisingly perhaps, is Liberal.

Today, through ‘user-generated content’, such as blogs, podcasts, public access TV channels, and Current TV, there are millions of voices out there. And while some have suggested that this would lead to democratization of the media, it could be argued instead that something like the opposite is happening - something that none of us ever dared imagine. We are seeing the news media as a whole, and individual news stories, used as political pawns, rather than as something that we use to base solutions on. This process of politicisation is only going to get worse, until the media get their act together en masse, stop trying to promote political viewpoints, and go back to doing what they do best: just reporting the facts and getting to ‘the truth’.