While Canadians were focused on a U.S. presidential debate, a trailer was released for a new conservative news channel called The News Forum that purports to “provide viewers with politically balanced domestic and international perspectives, inclusive of a conservative counterbalance for the current media landscape.”
The channel has a carriage deal with Bell Canada on all Bell’s TV systems. It is now operating as an exempt national news service, according to the CRTC, which allows such operations without a licence until they reach 200,000 subscribers.
Its ownership is a bit unclear, but its CEO is Tore Stautland, who is CEO of Trillennium Media Group Inc., a producer of mainly Christian programming for channels like Daystar Canada, Vision and Joytv.
Its on-air hosts include former Conservative minister Tony Clement, former Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leadership candidate Tanya Granic Allen, author Faytene Grasseschi, lawyer K.R. Davidson, former YesTV host Sheldon Neil, and former Global Thunder Bay reporter/anchor Nima Rajan.
From its ownership, description, choice of hosts and choice of topics and guests, it seems clear that The News Forum is designed to be a social/religious conservative outlet, meant more as a source of right-wing opinion than hard news. Which will no doubt draw comparisons to the Sun News Network, Quebecor’s right-wing news-opinion channel that shut down five years ago.
Based on my brief glances at its programming available online, it seems the main differences relate to tone (no Ezra Levant or Brian Lilley gleefully throwing mud, though Lilley has already been a guest), slant (more religious) and budget (more along the lines of a YouTube channel than a major TV network).
Like Sun News, The News Forum doesn’t try for a partisan balance. Almost all of the politicians it interviews are conservative.
The channel has made it clear it won’t shy away from controversial topics (and by that it seems to mean defending unpopular conservative views), conducting a friendly interview with controversial anti-trans researcher Debra Soh, for example.
It’s not clear that The News Forum will have actual journalists beyond that on-air staff, relying instead on a Canadian Press subscription and summarizing newspaper stories to provide that raw news material.
Its schedule consists of the same half-hour shows repeated every three hours. Besides those linked to above, it also includes two shows from Israel.
By not having that daytime news block and expensive journalists covering the country, could it save enough money to make this channel viable? We’ll see.
I contacted Bell, it’s not available in QC yet
Opinion opinion opinion from right-wing churning away. Harperites’ wet dream if it ever gets the reach of Foxnews. ugh
You are absolutely correct. I am saddened by the existence of another trash talking news opinion station which will likely spread lies and division like it’s big brother fox news. We all lose here. I’ll block it now, but I hold Bell response for allowing it air time.
When will this channel be available on Videotron?
A couple of interesting things here. If you zoom the camera back a bit from Tore Stautland and TMG, you find Zoomer Media Group… and Moses Znaimer. Suddenly you have a whole different situation going on. That by itself makes this one a little bit different.
Second interesting thing for me is that do appear to be taking a careful route of limiting their total programming spend, and trying to turn limited material into enough to get people to watch. It’s an interesting play, and certainly will help them to keep their production costs down at least initially.
Third, I think that it’s also a pretty solid move to capture an unserved Canadian market: Gently religious, mid conservatives. This pretty much covered much of the population from just west of Toronto all the way to the Rockies. It’s the same people who generally vote conservative and have those sort of views. Keeping away from the strident and often annoying voices like Levant might give them a chance to make some inroads into this viewer community. They do also have the some ability to use their existing more religious channels to perhaps filter some people into their new channel.
The only thing I think they are doing wrong at this point is that they are based on the wrong place. Instead of being in the axis of Toronto evil, they really should be PROUDLY based in Calgary or similar, and yes, even street fronting it like CityTV did on start up. It might give them more chance to get hooked into a community willing to listen to their material.
Conservatives must renounce the tendency to make our voices heard from one geographic center , be that Toronto, Calgary or other. We in Atlantic Canada have been ignored by both conservative and liberal parties for the last 80 years or more. If you want a central Canada, then just try to get Quebec on board and separate from Canada. Or would you prefer a “wexit” ?
I wish we could convince Nfld and the Maritimes to do our own thing and leave this situation.
I’ve seen enough to know that I’ll never watch it, unless I’ve been bad and need to do penance. Marginally less painful than kneeling on cans or self flagilating. Pretty funny that the station bills itself as “balanced”…yeh right!
In my honest opinion, I don’t think this should be launched as a TV channel first based on how this sounds like. This should be a well marketed streaming channel online first (learn from CBSN in the US how they made that a successful online streaming news channel), and then a TV channel second. I know The other issue I have if they want to make, which I don’t think they’ve learned from Sun’s mistake from almost 6 or 7 years ago with mandatory carriage is that it’s currently only on Bell’s system , even if they tried to put it on other providers, I’m worried it’s going to fall in the same fate. Where they spend a lot of money on this programming and people and it gets little to no ratings as a return in investment.
So happy to see that we might at last get a conservative voice heard across Canada. Newsprint is OK but it is away past date. We will be competing with the left wing CBC, CTV and Global and will find it VERY difficult to do so.
We must find a way for people on the internet to find us easily. What we have to say will grow the audience.
These days of the Marxist threat of the Great Reset will stir interest in our thoughts.
Why can’t there be an UNBIASED news channel for in Canada. All TV channels are biased in the same beliefs. I think if we heard both points of few we in Canada are intelligent enough to make up our own minds with the opportunity to explore the truth. It is sad that we are not allowed to come to our own conclusion by hearing both sides of the parties equally.
I found their YouTube channel only yesterday and skimmed through some content. Everything I saw was presented in a professional matter and the views while conservative were not extreme by any means. I’ll be checking in time to time. BTW your characterization of Debra Soh is incorrect. She is not anti-trans, she does believe however that the decision to transition should be made as an adult. This is hardly anti-trans nor a controversial position
I was excited when I first heard about your news channel. I have been a Conservative for many years and I was a fan of Sun News. I have tuned in several times and have been disappointed with what I’m seeing. I find your programming extremely boring and I am unable to watch for more than a few minutes at a time. I understand that you are brand new and this will take time but please make an effort to make your programming at least a little entertaining. There is a huge need for Conservative News in Canada but people will not support it if it’s not watchable. Thanks
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Obviously very few of the writers here have actually watched and listened to this show. Everything I have seen is a well balanced presentation of what is actually happening displaying more than one side of a situation. It is amazingly refreshing to hear news coverage not sponsored by government sources. Government news manipulation historically has never benefited democracy.