Sun News Exposed

" Sun News has been a strong voice supporting pro-life, pro-family and limited government ideals. This is what my show, Byline, has been about from the beginning," wrote Sun News host Brian Lilley to select supporters. "We are asking friends to help us out by signing our petition which will tell the CRTC that Sun News is a valued service that all Canadians should have access to."

Or rather : Canadians will be forced to pay for if they successfully petition the government to force 'free market' companies into doing business with Sun News.

So who answered the call?

Well, as already noted first by Alberta Diary : LifeSite: Sun News asks pro-lifers to support 'do or die' application.

The anti-choice Campaign Life Coalition : Sign the petition to keep Sun News Network on the Air

Canadian Shooting Sports Assoc. : Attention firearms enthusiasts -- please vote NOW to keep Sun News Network on the air

Catholic Canada : Help Sun News get a fair shake

Senator Patrick Brazeau : Dude, how many more ways can I say this: I. Support. Sun. News. Getting. Mandatory. Carriage. (With associated fees.)"

While over at Counterjihad!, if you scroll down a bit under
Breaking News! – FOIA response confirms Obama using stolen Social Security number, 
you'll find Canadians! Sun News needs your help!  

"Our rivals are doing everything in their power to stop us from getting a new broadcast licence. We’re used to their tactics, but we can’t let them get away with this. We need your support. We need you to take action.
Right now we’re getting the short end of the stick. Many local cable providers are refusing to offer Sun News! In fact, we’re only allowed in 4 out of 10 households in Canada and that’s not fair."

Along with alerts in Sun Media Corp's 43 daily newspapers and over 250 community weekly papers across the country, the largest press group in Canada, and CanoeTV, Canoe.ca., plus the daily harangues from Spun News itself.
Quite the little support group they have going there.

About that constant Sun News refrain: "only available in 4 out of 10 Canadian households."

Fagstein : Fact-checking the debate over Sun News

According to the latest CRTC Communications Monitoring Report, the major providers (Rogers, Shaw, Videotron, Cogeco and Bell) combine for 10.2 million subscribers out of 11.8 million total. According to the same report, 80% of subscribers have digital service, so that means at least 8 million of the 12 million (two thirds) could add Sun News to their service if they wanted to.

So I guess they don't want to, huh? Probably don't want to be forced to either.

Michael Geist  : CRTC should put consumers first and drop ‘must carry’ requirements

"CRTC - stop treating Canadians as ATMs for the broadcasters by dropping mandatory distribution altogether, while requiring broadcast distributors to offer all licensed channels to their subscribers in a pick-and-pay format so that at long last consumers get to decide what they want to watch and pay for."

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Paging Snuffleupagus to the SunNews white courtesy petition

The last time Sun News needed help with an online petition, Snuffleupagus and Homer Simpson were there to help, mysteriously adding their names  to 80,000 others on a "Stop Fox News North" Avaaz petition in 2010, along with a number of real people like Kady and Stephen Maher who didn't sign it.

Sun News mastermind, Kornkob ethanol lobbyist, and Steve's former director of communications Kory Teneycke 'discovered' the fraudulent names and wrote it up in his Sun News column on Sept 3 2010 in a bid to discredit the petition ....  only to get busted by Kady who pointed out the names on the petition were not published so how did he know about them then, huh?

Kory, who had wanted a Fox News for Canada as far back as 2003 and in March 2009 went with boss  Harper to meet with Fox News magnates Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in New York, resigned unexpectedly from Sun News four days after his Homer/Snuffy column, but returned as Sun News VP three and a half months later.

The very same day Homer and Snuffy were helping out Sun News with their bogus petition entries, Kory went on CBC's Power and Politics :

"We are not nor have we ever asked for mandatory carriage of this station where Canadians would have to be obliged to pay. We are saying that we would like to have it offered but theoretically it could be carried by no one ... these are all private sector negotiations." 

Or, as he put it in his Homer/Snuffy column :

"Sun TV News is not, nor has it ever, asked for “mandatory carriage” by cable or satellite companies. As the critics correctly point out, this would be tantamount to a tax on everyone with cable or satellite service"

Well that was then; this is now. 
Now they are asking the CRTC for exactly that - mandatory carriage to be included in every basic cable package in Canada plus guaranteed placement on the lower end of the dial. Because it turns out the 'free market' they go on about so relentlessly turns out to be just another of the many many obstacles they have to overcome on their path to Spun News greatness, like Ezra wearing that orange wig above to mock Jack Layton's funeral.

Sun News Network is arguing its signal must be broadcast into every Canadian home if it is ever going to recover from losses that have already reached $17-million a year.

This would generate about $18-million a year for the network ...

... sparking a whole slew of "then cancel my cable" comments under the G&M article.

Sun News argues that many Canadians have expressed enthusiasm for its conservative commentary-intensive programming, and would watch the channel regularly, but they don’t know it even exists. The digital cable or satellite connections currently required to see it haven’t been adopted by enough viewers in the senior citizen demographic that Quebecor concedes it is largely appealing to.

So Sun News has put up its own petition to the CRTC, presumably appealing to the angry racist misogynist xenophobic pro-gun pro-christian anti-choice anti-environment anti-union anti-gay anti-pot anti-Quebec anti-government anti-Roma anti-FN anti-Islam anti-arts tough-on-crime "senior citizen demographic" who "don't know it even exists" to lend their support. 

Well ok then. Maybe Homer and Snuffy could help out here.

Update : Arghh. Alberta Diary : SUN NEWS PLEADS WITH ANTI-CHOICE GROUP TO BACK ITS QUEST FOR 'RIGHT TO LIFE' SUBSIDY

Brian Lilley : "Sun News is the strongest voice for the pro-life cause on television in Canada. Bar none."

Sun VP Teneycke : " we need to demonstrate a groundswell of support for Sun News, and the readers of LifeSiteNews can help."

You can submit your opinion on SunNews' application directly to the CRTC here.
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Christy Clark's Big Fat Tarsands Fundraisers

Our national media seems pretty exercised about Alberta tarsands bigwigs and political insiders throwing a fundraiser in Calgary for our unelected Premier Christy Clark's Liberals to slag off on the NDP :

CBC : Albertans hold fundraiser for BC Liberals
G&M : Clark defends out-of-province fundraising for B.C. Liberal candidate
FPost : Alberta powerbrokers throw lifeline to B.C. premier as threat of tougher pipeline fight from NDP looms
Sun : B.C. Liberals tap Calgary crowd for election funds
Edmonton Journal : Alberta Tories helping to raise cash for beleaguered B.C. Liberals

They do know that last October, Chrusty went straight from her "frosty" meeting with Alberta's Alison Redford in which she loudly promised to protect BC's environment from Alberta pipelines, directly to a fundraiser at the Calgary Petroleum Club, also hosted by the same Murray Edwards, chairman of Canadian Natural Resources Limited, and exactly these same Alberta dudes, don't they? And that the year before on October 20, 2011, a $500-a-plate fundraiser was held for her, again at the Calgary Petroleum Club. 

They do realize that Chrusty's 2011 October Alberta fundraiser was set up by her then chief of staff Ken Boessenkool, formerly Tarsands Harper's chief of staff, right?

They have noticed that it was Encana's Gwyn Morgan who smoothed over the transition from the unre-electable Gordo to the unelected Premier Chrusty - the same Encana who have donated over a half a million dollars to Chrusty's Liberals in the last 3 years. Right?

Oh well, if Calgary could hold a $1000-a-plate fundraiser to elect John McCain for president in 2008, I guess Chrusty might be worth $125-a-plate to them in 2013.

h/t MoS and BCLib

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Update : RossK brings the "foreign special interests and their deep pocket puppets" angle to Encana's financial support for Christy. But come on, Ross, PetroChina buying 49.9% of an Encana project with an additional $1B to come over the next four years falls a whole .1% within Steve's new foreign ownership guidelines. So we're good here and no review required says Industry Canada.
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RoboConstructions: Del Mastro and the GeoVote

Update June 13 : The above vid has been taken down from Youtube so here's CTV's Youtube version of it :



Back to original January post .... Dean Del Mastro and his $21,000 personal cheque to Frank Hall at Holinshed Research Group for voter ID/GOTV services are back in the news tonight as McMaher reports the RCMP are investigating Steve's hapless parliamentary secretary/RoboCon pointman for his various 2008 election campaign financing irregularities and their apparent ham-fisted cover-up.

The  details   were   extensively   covered   back   in   June, including Holinshed's lapsed Feb 2 2010 lawsuit against Del Mastro for non-payment of use of their CIMS-like interactive voter-tracking system called GeoVote, and the six figure Canada Economic Action Plan cheque Holinshed received to develop GeoVote in 2009/10 ... before Holinshed dropped off the map themselves in 2011.


I haven't seen the vid up top of Frank Hall explaining the GeoVote system in 2008 posted anywhere else before so here ya go. In this demonstration, Mr Hall pinpoints locations of how people voted in the Don Valley West riding :

"What we've done is put a face on it and a geographic location on it and a contact that becomes personal or personable all of a sudden because you can take that data and use it - it puts a name and a face and a geographic location on something and that's powerful."

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