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Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday June 16, 2010

Canadian version of Fox News on the horizon

Canada will be getting another all-news TV channel, one that aims to banish the established “boring, smug and condescending” news networks to the sidelines with a snappy, right-wing take on current events modelled on America’s wildly successful and controversial Fox News.

Quebecor Media Inc. announced Tuesday it plans to launch Sun TV News, ending months of speculation and anticipation in Ottawa over what had been dubbed “Fox News North.”

Sun TV News will replace the Sun TV station in Toronto and be a collaboration between Quebecor Inc. (TSX:QBR.A) and its TVA Group and Sun Media Corp. units and will challenge “the English Canadian TV news establishment,” Pierre Karl Peladeau said Tuesday at the network’s launch at the Toronto Sun Building in downtown Toronto.

“We see an opportunity in offering Canadians something new, something better, something distinct. It is time to shake up the current players of the Canadian broadcasting system,” Peladeau said in a statement.

Heading the new channel will be newly hired Quebecor vice-president Kory Teneycke, a former staff member at the Prime Minister’s Office, who said Canadians have tuned out traditional news channels that are “boring, smug and condescending.”

“CBC News Network and CTV News Channel have had respectively 21 and 13 years to get it right and they’ve failed to win over viewers,” Teneycke said.

“Canadian TV news today is narrow, complacent, and politically correct,” he said, adding that Sun TV News will be “different,” with hard news reporting during the day and “straight talk” opinion journalism at night. (CTV)