By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
The CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) has granted a license for the launch of Faux News North, otherwise known as SUN-TV.
The new cable network will be a Canadian takeoff on Amerikkka’s Fox (read Faux) News and its programming will consist of a blend of falsified and exaggeratedc news reports and extreme right-wing commentary.
SUN-TV, of course, is named after Quebecor Inc.’s stable of a half dozen tabloids and a couple of dozen tabloids posing as broadsheet dailies. And like the flagship Toronto Sun and its sisters in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary, it is being designed for “people who can’t read without moving their lips.”
There was a time in Canada – not so long ago – that when a TV or radio station or network or Cable channel broadcast a political opinion, it had to provide equal time for a respondent with an opposing viewpoint.
But that’s not the case today. As a handful of right-wing corporations took over almost all of Canada’s mass media, they demanded that Ottawa drop any requirement for balanced opinion. Ottawa, of course, complied.
Even the CBC – once a source of independent and balanced news reporting – now hews to the corporate capitalist agenda.
Witness, for example, the fact that the CBC’-TVs only editorialist and CBC Radio’s only national radio call-in show host, Rex Murphy, is a rabid right-winger. Even the CBC does not provide equal time for opposing views to be aired.
CBC Radio’s national call-in show, Cross-Country Check-Up now vets its callers to ensure that a majority of those callers who get on the air express either right-wing or centrist views. Leftists are discouraged from even calling the show.
Once the new SUN-TV is up and running, we can expect right-wing propaganda and drivel to become the exclusive news diet of a wide swath of Canadians who have already been considerably brainwashed by the psudo-journalistic utterances of the Toronto Sun, the Ottawa Sun, the Winnipeg Sun, the Edmonton Sun, the Calgary Sun, the London Free Press, Le Journal de Montreal, Le Journal de Quebec and a couple of dozen equally right-wing small town dailies across Canada.
There will be no attempt at providing balance or offering an equal opportunity for progressive viewpoints to be heard by Canadians.
There will not even be a requirement that when Faux News North publishes fabricated or falsified news reports that they be labelled as propaganda.
It can be expected that its “journalists,”
“consultants” and “commentators” will be a cadre of semi-literates who have sold their souls for a chance to rub elbows with the right-wing socioeconomic elite and have no qualms about authoring and disseminating anti-democratic right-wing bullshit.
The CRTC and the Government of Canada – the minority government of Conservative Stephen Harper, propped up by the Liberal official opposition of Michael Ignatieff – should be ashamed of themselves.
And all Canadian who can read at at least a Third Grade level should permanently boycott Faux News North – SUN-TV – or whatever new name it chooses to give itself.