It was back on 13th September that Sun News Network crossed a line that they’ve crossed about a million times before, but something about this was different.
It was on their show “The Source with Ezra Levant”, that Ezra made his big mistake.
The response to that commentary was different to anything else. Trudeau has long been a favourite target of Sun News presenters for commentary and ridicule, but this was something else. This was a personal attack, both on him and his father. Not the first and probably won’t be the last, but Justin Trudeau decided that enough was enough and that he was going to boycott Sun Media journalists until the company apologised.
This boycott almost backfired on him spectacularly, as the following video, also from Sun News Network, in this case their “Byline with Brian Lilley” programme, demonstrates.
Okay, so maybe there’s a bit of desperation about the boycott by Trudeau, but the question is serious enough to possibly cause trouble. However, it didn’t and Sun News Network is now about to apologise for Ezra Levant’s completely irresponsible rant.
Congratulations, Sun Media Corporation. You finally learned a little lesson about media responsibility, finally, almost too late to matter, almost too little a lesson to really have any meaning, but you have learned it.
Aww, who the heck do I think I’m kidding??? Of course they haven’t learned their lesson, they’re just so desperate to get Justin Trudeau to answer their questions that they will do whatever he wants to try to get him to end his boycott. After all, you can’t keep crying all the time about the fact that the Liberal Party leader, and possibly the next Canadian Prime Minister, is refusing to answer your one sided, conservative-biased, moronic questions that are actually bad attempts at traps to try to trip up Trudeau and keep Stephen Harper in office for as long as you can.
You really don’t deserve to have the ability to call yourself a news network. That’s not a complaint about bias, by the way, that’s a matter of definition. Sun News Network doesn’t have a news programme in it’s primetime line-up, they are all opinion shows.
BATTLEGROUND: An opinion show all about politics, especially favouring conservative politics. 5pm to 6pm ET.
BYLINE: An opinion show on stories you won’t find on any other channel, because no other channel is dumb enough to report propaganda. 6pm to 7pm, repeated 9pm to 10pm.
THE ARENA: They say the show presents “…strong balanced opinions to challenge conventional thinking…”. I say the show presents opinions that have been balanced on the edge of a cliff in order to challenge gravity(!). 100% of the time, gravity wins. 7pm to 8pm.
THE SOURCE: Ezra Levant basically lets rip on anything and everything that his extreme conservative sensibilities find abhorrent, which to be honest, is pretty much everything. 8pm to 9pm, repeated 10pm to 11pm.
It’s not merely the opinions that I object to, it’s the irresponsible attitude behind them that leads them to think they can say anything they like without actually worrying about the response from the people they attack. They think they can copy the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, forgetting that they do not live in the United States and as such do not have those first amendment rights, and even then, I would define freedom of speech separately from having the right to spew hatred, lies and propaganda. It’s fine to have opinions, based on facts, but you can’t make up your own facts, based on nothing but your own opinions, which are not based on any facts.
When any media organisation thinks that they can make up their own facts to advance their own agenda, they make themselves many things, a laughing stock, irrelevant, disconnected from actuality, and they end up also exposing themselves as liars, propagandists, and haters.
Sun News Network is one of a number of channels and organisations who have no concept of how to be a responsible media platform. Fox News Channel, and their sister business station, Fox Business, and sister newspaper The New York Post are the obvious and long time examples of irresponsible media, and in the UK, tabloids like The Sun, Daily Star, Daily Express and Daily Mail, are the very definition of irresponsible media, but in Canada, the Sun News Network, and their associated newspapers, like The Toronto Sun, and the Calgary Sun, are also the definition of irresponsible media. Internationally, you can also add Press TV in Iran and Russia Today to the list of irresponsible media, and there are no doubt one or two others that I have yet to encounter.
