Sun News Network

» see sunnewsnetwork.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On its best night Sun News Network had 89,000 viewers. That was August 2011, four months after launch, and it never happened again. By 2013 the channel was averaging somewhere between eight and sixteen thousand people at any given moment, which works out to about a tenth of one percent of Canadian television, and it finished fourth out of four among English-language news channels for its entire existence.

It launched on 18 April 2011 at half past four in the afternoon, owned by Quebecor through TVA Group and Sun Media, and the press had already named it Fox News North before a minute of it aired. That was more or less the pitch: an explicitly conservative, opinion-led news channel in a market whose broadcast news had been built around public-service neutrality. Ezra Levant and Brian Lilley did the polemics while David Akin did actual parliamentary reporting, and the mix never settled.

It went off the air on 13 February 2015 at five o'clock in the morning, after Quebecor had spent months trying and failing to sell it. About 150 full-time staff lost their jobs, along with fifty or so freelancers and contributors. The broadcast license was handed back to the regulator on 4 March. A channel that could not get itself carried on basic cable inside its own country was never going to reach anyone abroad, and nothing about this one crossed a border, including the argument it was having.

~ the record ~

~ the ruling ~

The thing that actually killed it was a regulatory decision on 8 August 2013. Sun News had asked the CRTC for mandatory carriage, meaning a guaranteed slot on every basic cable package in the country with a per-subscriber fee attached, which is the arrangement keeping several Canadian specialty channels solvent. The Commission refused. It found the channel had not demonstrated it met the bar, and it noted, with some coldness, that Sun News had known and accepted the financial risks of launching without guaranteed carriage in the first place.

Without that ruling the economics did not work. Most Canadians who might have watched could not easily find the channel, because it sat in high-numbered tiers that had to be bought deliberately, and advertisers price against reach rather than against intensity. The last eighteen months were spent looking for a buyer. ZoomerMedia looked and passed. Leonard Asper looked and passed. When Postmedia bought Sun Media's 175 English-language newspapers in October 2014, the television channel was specifically left out of the deal, which was the clearest public signal available that nobody wanted it.

~ five in the morning ~

Signing off at 5 a.m. is a detail worth keeping. There was no final broadcast and no farewell panel. Quebecor picked the lowest-viewership hour of the week and cut the feed, and most of the staff found out by press release on the same morning. Ezra Levant founded Rebel News within days of the shutdown, and it is the only part of Sun News still running in any form. It was built for the web, which is the distribution problem Sun News never solved.

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