How Fox North became Harper's priority

Remember the attack ad the Paul Martin Liberals used in the 2006 federal election campaign that backfired so badly it helped galvanize Canadians to turf them out instead?

Aimed at terrifying Canadians about the militaristic and undemocratic impulses of Stephen Harper's Conservatives, the Liberal ad intoned over a war drumbeat: "Soldiers with guns... In our cities... In Canada... We did not make this up."

Today the tables could be abruptly turned on the Conservatives with this far more sinister message: "The prime minister's office. In a first-world democracy. Controlling a major media network. We did not make this up."

Unlike the ephemeral "soldiers with guns in our streets," we have the very real and menacing prospect of a major national media chain being bulldozed into a blatant propaganda tool by and for the party in power.

The same national media chain intends to launch a Category One television news channel in addition to its string of newspapers to blare forth its political message 24/7. More ominously, the PMO is prepared, according to credible reports, to walk over any cavilling by the nation's broadcast watchdog, the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Corporation, to grant Sun Media's masters that coveted first-class licence.

Canadian Press reported last June that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had lunch with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in New York on March 30, 2009. Australian billionaire Murdoch owns Fox News; Ailes, a brass-knuckle Republican stragetist, is its president.

Kory Teneckye, Harper's recently-retired communications director, was also present.

As columnist Lawrence Martin reported in The Globe and Mail last week, Teneycke has become the point man propelling Quebecor's Pierre-Karl Peledeau's plan to create a right-wing television network modelled on Fox News.

"The new network is a high priority for Harper, for whom controlling the message has always been... of paramount importance," Martin wrote Aug. 19.

Teneycke's takeover of Sun Media's political coverage was quick and brutal. Most of its best columnists were fired, including Greg Weston, who broke the story of the G20 "fake lake" embarrassment, and Eric Margolis, who alone among Canadian journalists, never ceased pointing out the folly of the Iraq war and the tragedy of the Afghan conflict. His sin was to continually point out that neither were ever about "democracy" or liberating hapless women and girls being hacked to death daily for going to work or school, but solely about oil and oil pipelines.

The new crowd of journalists, all supposedly certified by Teneycke to be politically correct stenographers to Harper power, are proving their obedience daily in blended news/opinion coverage permanently slanted in favour of his government and against all who oppose him.

The tone of political discourse, already shifted sharply right with the advent of Conrad Black's National Post in 1998, is about to take a quantum leap further down that road. The signs are numerous and ominous: The internet is already doused daily with the vitriol of thousands of anonymous far-right bloggers who slander and libel politicians, the media and all opponents with vile, often illiterate postings. Parliament and the country's entire political culture is being dug ever deeper into a mire of character assassination, personal insult and attack, smear campaigns, relentless and ruthless partisanship and denigration and demonization of any and all opponents.

It's already so bad, it's difficult to believe it can get worse - even with a "Fox News North" political channel. The scrapping of the long-form census despite the pleadings from virtually all Canadian civil society and well beyond Canada's borders led Maclean's Ottawa editor Andrew Coyne to characterize the Harper brand of politics as "a uniquely nasty, know-nothing strain of conservatism" that whips up popular hostility, "not just to experts and intellectuals, but to knowledge itself."

The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson doubts Fox News North is going to "make or break or even influence the shape of Canadian politics, whatever the ideological fervour of Kory Teneycke" but author and Toronto Star columnist Linda McQuaig disagrees.

"There's been a tendency in the Canadian media to dismiss the threat of a Fox News transplant on the grounds Canadians wouldn't fall for that sort of nasty, right-wing extremism," she writes. "But that comforting notion may be naïve." Most people don't have time to follow politics in detail, she continues. "If they hear constant sound bites suggesting global warming is a hoax or public health care just doesn't work, after a while the message starts to seem believable."

She points out the media already blasts Canadians with a steady chorus of right-wing ideas. "A Fox-style network here -- if Harper gets his way -- would turn that into a deafening cacophony."

It all makes soldiers with guns on Canada's streets more plausible with every passing day.

Frances Russell is a Winnipeg-based political journalist and author. She is a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press and is the author of two books, Mistehay Sakahegan -- The Great Lake, a historical "biography" of Lake Winnipeg, and The Canadian Crucible -- Manitoba's Role in Canada's Great Divide, an examination of how French-English relations in the "Keystone" province affected the course of Canadian history. Both books won the Manitoba Historical Society's Margaret McWilliams Award for popular history, in 2000 and 2003, respectively.

Comments

Submitted by BCL on August 31, 2010 - 10:48am.

Excellent piece, with one exception. You ask in the first graph:

"Remember the attack ad the Paul Martin Liberals used in the 2006 federal election".

I remember the ad, but I also remember that that ad was never used. It was found on a server that contained a bunch of test ads, many of which did not run. That one certainly did not run and was never seriously considered for broadcast.

Submitted by PoliticalPundit on August 31, 2010 - 12:54pm.

Harper has succeeded in putting together two powerful networks. Frances Russell is one of only a few journalists who have covered the development of these two powerful networks, both of which threaten the very heart and soul of Canadian democracy.

The first is a communications network thanks to the Quebec Peladeau empire of Sun news and soon to be Sun TV. The Western based Reform/Alliance rank and file, militants, and leaders, most of whom despise Quebec's powerful role in Confederation, have now become dependent upon a powerful Quebec Corporate news giant to advance their social, economic and political agendas.

How Harper and his political and financial backers put this powerful communications network together is a story that needs to be fully researched and told.

The second network is a grass roots network that goes back to the very origins of the Reform Party that Manning and Harper founded in 1987-88. This network is comprised of all the various Evangelical Christian nationalist organizations that include churches, schools, and social centres, large and small, that have sprung up across Canada over the past two decades. This network is also very well funded by wealthy businessmen in Western Canada and in the Toronto Corporate world as well as by sister organizations and like minded Christian businessmen in the US.

This ever expanding Christian network was instrumental in assisting Harper's Conservative coalition of fiscal conservatives, values conservatives, libertarians, and populist democrats achieve power in 2006 and retain power in 2008. For confirmation of this network please read Marci Mcdonald's The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada.

Both of these networks, communications and Christian nationalist, will probably return Harper and the Conservative to power, perhaps with a majority, in 2010 or 2011.

The health and survival of Canadian democracy and democratic institutions are are stake.

It is imperative that Canadians become educated about what has, and what is, happening to their political parties and political institutions so that they can make informed decisions in the next federal election.

Submitted by watson on August 31, 2010 - 2:19pm.

Canaduans are eager to embrace fascism. So long as they keep the hockey on teevee, the country will be completely stolen, with the eager acceptance of most regular folk. G20 police action and the subsequent wash showed this most tellingly.

"Peace, order and good corporate profits" is how it goes, no?

Submitted by Patsplace on August 31, 2010 - 4:39pm.

I think the thing that is being overlooked is that the idea of a Fox North style station is hugely supported by the majority of Canadians as a way of getting news without the constant left-wing slant. Once the News as it happens is reported, without dressing it up in Socialist Stockings, I think that the net benefit will be good for all Canadians.

Submitted by criticallthinker on August 31, 2010 - 5:21pm.

The Liberal ad intoned over a war drumbeat: "Soldiers with guns... In our cities... In Canada... We did not make this up." Hmm, it wasn't soldiers, it was police from all over the country aiming their weapons at G20 protesters. Mind you, based on Chretien's performance, the liberals would have done the same thing.

Submitted by 2dawall on August 31, 2010 - 6:32pm.

Where is this "hugely supported by the majority of Canadians" come from? Are people jumping in the street for Fox North? How was this determined?

Submitted by ozkarlav on August 31, 2010 - 8:12pm.

Sign this petition to keep American hate media out of Canada

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