Fox News North: the plot that wasn’t

There’s no conspiracy to bring a right wing news channel to Canada, according to the head of the CRTC.

For all you doubters who think no one reads newspapers anymore, consider the following. Two weeks ago Lawrence Martin wrote this column in the Globe and Mail, floating the possibility that Stephen Harper was going to fire the head of the CRTC in order to get his right wing buddies at Sun Media a TV licence. Granted, anti-Tory civil servants were dropping like flies at the time, but there was scant evidence for the plot. That didn’t stop Margaret Atwood from running with the column and joining a campaign to stop the Foxification of Canadian airwaves.

Then today comes this letter from CRTC head Konrad Von Finkelstein (VF to his friends), asking, essentially, what the hell is everyone talking about. Harper’s never even talked to him about Sun TV.

Cue the pundit reaction.

“How does Margaret Atwood feel now, having carefully specified that her opposition to the new channel had nothing to do with censorship but was aimed entirely at political interference?” asks Kelly McParland in the National Post. “No doubt Harper forced VF to write the letter… It’s all part of the plot. We’ll let you know which plot soon as we figure it out.”

The Globe’s Norman Spector blames the country’s mailmen for not sorting this all out sooner. “Maybe Canada Post is to blame for the delay. Or perhaps the chairman of the CRTC has been on vacation. How else can one explain” the delay in VF’s response, he writes. “Think of all the ink that’s been spilled based on the premise of Mr. Martin’s column.”

If Sun TV ever does appear on boob tubes across the country, what will it deliver to viewers? According to Kate Chappell in The Mark, “a trumped up, and thus false, presentation of a polarized Canada.” She says Sun TV is banking on the Americans’ culture war theory of broadcasting, in which journalists “seek (ideological) conflict because it makes for better copy.”

If that doesn’t sound like a channel Canadians would watch, it appears Sun Media isn’t leaving its success up to market forces. It’s asking the CRTC to make it a mandatory part of cable packages.