‘Fox News North’ TV Network Shuts Down In Canada

Canadian TV viewers spoke loud and clear to the Sun News Network, dubbed Fox News North:  “Bon Voyage, get outta here…nobody in Canada wants to watch your extreme right-wing faux news”.  Accordingly, at 5am ET Friday the Sun News Network went off the air after failing to find a new owner. There was no fanfare and no on-air announcement.  After 4 years of dismal ratings ( 0.1 percent of Canadian viewers) the screen finally went dark and was replaced by the Sun TV logo. 

Fox News North Shuts Down after 4 years of horrible ratings

Fox News North struggled from the outset and never managed to pay its way simply because there weren’t enough wing-nuts, nutbars and wackos to watch it. Canadians have grown up with solid, honest reporting from not only the CBC but from CTV as well.  Also, Canadian businesses ignored it and refused to force it on an unwilling public by making it the designated channel in bars, waiting rooms and hotels like they do for Fox News in the USA.

Off-the-Air announcement

Fox News North’s fate was probably set back in 2009 when Canada’s conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper unsuccessfully tried to have the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) overturn a law prohibiting lying on broadcast news.  Yes, Faux News aficionados, Canadian law does require that "a licenser may not broadcast ... any false or misleading news." The provision has kept right-wing talk radio out of Canada.

When Sun News launched in 2011, its cronies attacked what they described as the "smug, condescending, irrelevant" journalism of existing Canadian outlets like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Instead, they began to broadcast shows like The Source which was a thinly disguised clone of Bill O’Reilly’s The Factor on Fox.  Ezra Levant, host of The Source, and the new face of the network soon ran into legal troubles with respect to “truthiness”.

The Source’s Ezra Levant was found guilty of libel and ordered to pay $80,000

Levant was sued for libel by a lawyer in Saskatchewan.  Justice Wendy Matheson, an Ontario judge who heard the defamation lawsuit, ruled that he was guilty of libel and found that he demonstrated a "reckless disregard for the truth." 

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