Jay Currie writes:
Television is dying. Viewership is dropping, ad revenues are down. It’s dying because no one has time and no one wants to be talked at. Talked with, perhaps. My phone offers me a thousand and eleven news sources, raw video of events: the opinions I can develop myself.
Sun’s critical mistake – other than having the production values of community TV, was to miss how mainstream, lefty, media works. The opinion is embedded not overt.
I love Ezra and Brian Lily [sic]. For five minutes at a time max. Which leaves 23 hours and change to do serious reporting, regional coverage, round tables, celebrity bs, culture, media, books and call ins. Plus serious business reporting when the market is open.
None of that happened. Or, if it did, no one knew about it.
Jay also says that the market has spoken, but in fairness to Sun, this market was never “free” because the CRTC et al determined who received mandatory carriage.
A lot of commenters elsewhere are saying “Sun was the only TV station I watched.” That’s part of Sun’s problem. They were on a platform many of their potential viewers didn’t use, and the one’s that did — older people — couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for the cable news package that carried them.
UPDATE from Gavin McInnes:
I wondered if things had changed when we first started shooting the pilot and then I saw the nightmare of bureaucracy Sun had to go through trying to get the network seen. They didn’t want any favors. They just wanted to be given the chance to be watched by the millions of Canadians who wanted to see them. The CBC gets a red carpet (imagine if NPR was as popular as Fox News and helped design broadcasting legislature). Despite being paid for by taxpayers, CBC gets all kinds of freebies and are even considering charging people. Socialist news can get away with that kind of audacity. A right-leaning network has no hope. That’s why I left Canada.
