Sun News Network Canada (that's FOX news north) shut down.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Sun News network pulled the plug early Friday morning with little forewarning.  I guess the parent company, Quebecoir, was trying to sell it off but wasn't able to find a buyer and pulled the plug. 

The network came on air about 4 years ago but it never really stood a chance.  Sun News pushed to be included on basic cable so that they'd have access to all homes with TV but the CRTC, the Canadian broadcast regulatory body refused the request and the channel got buried up in the nosebleed digits.  I think Murdoch gave up on the channel right then because their budget and production values were laughably bad.  The lighting, sound, and camera work looked like a high school A/V club effort. 

By the end of the network's run, they were only managing to pull in roughly 8,000 viewer per night for their prime time broadcasts.

I think the tone of the reporting and opinion pieces was a little to strident and that may have turned off some viewers.   Ezra Levant was probably not the best choice for a headliner.  I tend to agree with him the majority of the time and even I find him irritating and hard to take.  Michael Coren's show should never have seen the light of day on a news channel.  It had more in common with something off of 100 Huntley Street or Jack Van Impe ministries than actual news.

I think Brian Liley's show as well as David Akin's  were quite good, the hosts well reasoned, and reasonable with guests and it's a shame those two didn't get a wider audience.

I do agree with Levant's take that the network wasn't really given a fair shake in that the CRTC publicly said that preference should be given to Canadian news services over foreign ones but then they refused the request to put SUN on basic cable and even placed them on a lower tier in access to service than CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg, and Al Jezeera.  Only Russia Today was less accessible.

They also couldn't really compete with the likes of the CBC, which receives $1.2 billion in funding and has total market access.

While I wasn't really a fan of the channel for its amateurish production values and some of the polarizing figures, I do lament the fact that it means less Canadian news and the loss of an alternative point of view as it was really the only right-of-centre broadcast news on offer.

Here's a rather testy exchange between SUN new's Ezra Levant and the CBC's Carol Off discussing the end of Sun News.  You can listen to David Akin first or just jump ahead to Levant's interview at 8:10 or so.  It starts off reasonably enough, but Off comes off as a little smug and condescending and Ezra just can't keep his natural pugnaciousness in check and starts to lash out.

The interview is part 2 on the selection menu on the left.

http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/popupaudio.html?clipIds=2653719859,2653717734,2653717737

[endfire79]

Good riddance Ezra Levant, really distasteful guy.

[Arctic Blast]

Good riddance Ezra Levant, really distasteful guy.

Pretty much. He basically announced he's an opinion for hire the instant he tried to claim that people's issues with Rob Ford stemmed purely from his politics.

Of course, if you can find that one and only episode that the Ford Brothers got on the network, it was unbelievable comedy gold.