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.
