Azzo Rezori: The Sun News Network sets, and journalism needs a spark
As had been expected for some time, Sun News Network, also nicknamed "Fox News North," shut down last week after it failed to find someone willing to take it over from its previous owner who’d lost interest.
Former executives were quick to blame the Canadian Radio-television and Communications Commission for not guaranteeing enough air time in the country’s channelverse for the Sun News’ experiment in tough and opinionated journalism.
Sun News lasted not quite three years. It started off with the mission to give the “smug, condescending, irrelevant“ journalism of other Canadian TV news outlets a run for their viewers and money.
It blipped off the air quietly on Feb. 13 — a Friday the 13th — with an average viewership of just over 12,000 and some $47 million dollars in the hole.
Sun newspapers are known for their scantily dressed centrefold babes. Sun News Network applied the same approach to its all-news TV channel: strip the facts of the daily news down to the luscious skin of naked and brawling opinion. If it worked well enough for Fox News in the United States, so why wouldn’t it work here?
Well, it didn’t, and that merits some discussion.
Stephen Ward is a highly respected Canadian journalist who now heads the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. He’s not a fan of the “fiercely partisan and opinionated hosts” who’ve become the trademark of Fox News.
Like many others at the time he wondered whether Sun News would go down the same road.
Well, it did.
Diatribe journalism
In all fairness, Sun News did try to strike a balance at first, running more or less straight news during the day and going for opinionated hosting at night.
However, when that didn’t bring more viewers on board, the network made a deliberate move towards diatribe journalism with the justification that it needed to distinguish itself more from its Canadian competition.
Every day journalists worth their pens and keyboards walk the fine line between informing and creating dramatic effect, in the hope that the right balance will make readers/listeners/viewers sit up, pay attention, and feel rewarded by that extra bit of something in the package. News can be dry and tasteless, and as the saying goes, a bit of seasoning makes the stuff go down.
Tabasco sauce laced with astringent
But Sun News added more than just seasoning. Referring to the Roma as “a shiftless group of hobos” who “rob people blind,” is more like hate and bigotry served in a spoonful of Tabasco sauce laced with astringent.
Towards the end of its run, Sun News’ alternative to its “smug” competition came down to ranting about Justin Trudeau as a “slut” because he kissed a bride at a wedding party, and telling a Spanish banana executive to do the unspeakable to his mother.
Stephen Ward makes it quite clear he’s not opposed to opinion. On the contrary, he argues that well-balanced and well-deliberated opinion journalism is needed more than ever.
Andrew Cline, another journalist turned academic, makes the same case. “Opinion journalism matters,” he writes. “It can make information useful by suggesting how to use it, how to think about it and how to react to it.”
As old as journalism itself
This debate about how to present information is as old as journalism itself. If the point is to inform, then the question becomes, what serves the purpose best, the dry approach that gives the facts and nothing but the facts, or the approach that allows for more flavours, opinion being one of them.
So-called objective journalism can be just as misleading as so-called opinion journalism.
The obvious answer is that it doesn’t have to be just one or the other, yet that’s exactly how things have polarized in recent years, with the distorted picture of bias-spewing, hate-mongering, foul-spirited, civically disgruntled radicals and loose cannons on one side, and calm, reasoned, civically minded and restrained communicators on the other.
It’s never that simple. So-called objective journalism can be just as misleading as can be so-called opinion journalism. One can fail by giving no context, the other by giving the wrong one.
Both sides have perfectly good reasons for arguing the shortcomings of the other.
What’s distorted the picture even more is that a motley crowd of dissenters conveniently called the "radical right" has been hogging one side, while the journalistic establishment has been massing on the other.
An artificial divide
It’s an entirely artificial standoff, and it serves neither side well.
If Sun News thought the viewing public’s increasing indifference to standard news fare meant Canadians were ready for the corrosive information snuff it had in store for them, it made a huge mistake.
American freelance journalist Juliet Jacques, who often writes for the New Statesman, adds yet another dimension to the debate. She sees opinion journalism as a great way to shine light on what she calls “marginalized” issues.
She also suggests too many columnists on both sides distort their information by placing too much emphasis on certainty.
Isn’t there room “for ambivalence, for doubt, for admitting that you don’t know everything?” she asks.
In other words, a bit more humbleness on both sides could go a long way to closing the widening gap which is really no gap at all.
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