TORONTO – Quebecor will transform Sun TV into a new “hard news/straight talk” English specialty channel called Sun TV News for television audiences tired of “being exposed to dry news”, said Quebecor president and CEO of Pierre Karl Péladeau in Toronto on Tuesday morning.
In his widely anticipated announcement, Péladeau said that the new channel will be loosely based on the company’s French-language all-news specialty service LCN, which saw its ratings more than triple when it moved toward that formula three years ago. Sun TV News will replace the company’s struggling, Toronto-based over-the-air Sun TV station.
"Far too many Canadians are tuning out completely or changing their dials to American all-news channels”, Peladeau said in a statement. “They’re opting out or switching over. That’s not good for Canadian television. It’s not good for Canadian democracy. And it’s not good for Canada itself. Quebecor sees an untapped market opportunity in English Canadian TV news. We see an opportunity in offering Canadians something new, something better, something distinct. It is time to shake up the current players of the Canadian broadcasting system. It’s time for a new choice, a new voice. It’s time for Sun TV News."
The channel proposes to go “beyond the obvious day-by-day headlines and to cover the full range of stories that impact our society, our democracy and our economy”, the announcement continued.
"CBC News Network and CTV News Channel have had respectively 21 and 13 years to get it right and they’ve failed to win over viewers”, added Kory Teneycke, VP of development of Quebecor Media and the head of the new channel, in the announcement. "Canadian TV news today is narrow, complacent, and politically correct. Sun TV News will be different from the all-news channel format we know all too well in Canada. It will offer Canadians an attractive mixture of ‘hard news’ reporting during the day and ‘straight talk’ opinion journalism at night. This will not be another network catering to elite opinion and ignoring stories important to many Canadians."
TVA Group, on behalf of a partnership to be constituted between TVA Group and Sun Media Corporation, submitted an application to the CRTC for a three year category 1 specialty TV license for Sun TV News on June 1st. The application is under review.
