Fox News North Claims its First Casualty (With Help From Margaret Atwood)

From CBC Radio’s Vinyl Café (our egregious version of Prairie Home Companion) to CTV’s Canadian Idol (our pathetic version of the American same), Canada has a bad habit of taking the worst elements of American media and making versions that are, surprisingly, even worse. One thing we’ve mostly managed to avoid, though, is the segregation of the news media into hyper-partisan factions of poisoned “truthiness.”

All of that changed this summer when one of the Canada’s largest media conglomerates, Quebecor Media, appointed Kory Teneycke to the position of Vice President, Development, and charged him with midwifing the birth of SunTV News, a new cable news channel that would compete with the established offerings from the CBC and CTV. And all of that changed yesterday, when Teneycke had one of the most spectacular falls from grace in Canadian media history.

The proposed station was quickly dubbed “Fox News North” by its opponents, for two reasons. First, Teneycke’s previous job was director of communication for Stephen Harper, the most pro-American prime minister in Canadian history. But more importantly, it appears

that plans for the station were hatched in March 2009, when Harper and Teneycke had a secret meeting in New York with Ruper Murdoch and Roger Ailes. It is almost certain that it was at that meeting that a plan was hatched to bring Fox News’s faux-populist liberal-baiting style of journalism to Canada.

Given his deep ties to the Harper government, the 36-year old Teneycke (pronounced “Ten-IKE”) instantly became one of the most powerful media honchos in the country. He came on like a hockey enforcer, firing reporters suspected of being not politically onside, hiring more ideologically flexible journalist talents, and generally building the new station’s brand around his own brash image. Teneycke’s favoured medium was the Twitterverse, where he argued with enemy columnists, made cocksure pronouncements, and routinely denounced the elitist lefty politics of the “lamestream” media. (His twitter account has since been deleted.)

Apart from baiting liberals, Teneycke’s primary concern was to get SunTV News rolled into Canadian cable packages. In July, the CRTC (Canada’s version of the FCC) denied Quebecor’s request

to have the channel classified “Category A”, which would have required all cable/satellite providers to offer the service.  In response, Quebecor came back at the CRTC with a new application under a different category, but asking for an exception that would have had the same result – it would have been a “must-carry” station for three years.

This prompted the international civic organization Avaaz to launch an online petition to block the creation of SunTV News. The petition was signed by tens of thousands of people, most notably by the novelist Margaret Atwood, who promoted the Avaaz petition on her Twitter account, saying she signed it in protest against what she saw as interference in the approval process by the Harper government (see here, here and here). Atwood has over 84,000 Twitter followers. The story picked up.

Kory Teneycke took to the pages of one of his own newspapers to blast Atwood (whom he accused of putting “her political agenda ahead of principles and patriotism”), and Avaaz (which he denounced as a front for George Soros). But Teneycke also pointed out that

the petition was of dubious legitimacy, since in addition to Atwood, other famous celebrities had signed on. These included Dwight Shrute (from The Office), Boba Fett (of Star Wars), Snuffalupagus (Sesame Street) and Homer Simpson.

While true, Teneycke’s knowledge of these bogus signatures was strange, since Avaaz hadn’t yet published a list of names on the petition. When this was pointed out, Teneycke claimed that he had an inside source who had told him about the fake names. But Avaaz executive director Ricken Patel (himself a Canadian living in New York) pointed out that the fake signatures had all come from the same Ottawa IP address (Teneycke lives in Ottawa), and on September 14 Avaaz asked the RCMP to look into the petition fraud.

The next morning, a few Canadian Twitter-obsessives noticed that Teneycke’s account had been suspended. A few hours later, Quebecor held a press conference to announce that Kory Teneycke was resigning immediately from Quebecor. He acknowledged at the press conference that the fight over the new station had become “vicious and vitriolic,” conceding that his own behaviour had contributed to the debased nature of the debate.

Teneycke refused to say whether his departure had anything to do with the Avaaz request for a criminal investigation. Avaaz co-founder and executive director Ricken Patel, though, took the opportunity to declare victory, saying in a statement: “American democracy has been poisoned by this kind of crony-media and its biased propaganda. What we’re seeing is that Canadians aren’t buying it.”

That remains to be seen, since Quebecor says it will continue with its attempts to get the CRTC to approve a broadcast licence for Sun TV News. Regardless, Canada’s purported ‘Fox News North’ has taken a beating: yet to broadcast a minute of programming, and already with its first casualty, after a spectacular and humiliating flame0ut. Oh and also, George Soros has reportedly announced that he is suing Sun Media for defamation.

On one side was Kory Teneycke, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Quebecor, with help from Rupert Murdoch. On the other, Avaaz, Margaret Atwood..and, as it turns out, Kory Teneycke, thanks to his own hubris and bad judgment. Fair and balanced? So far, so good.

Andrew Potter is a Mediaite contributor and public affairs columnist for Maclean’s, Canada’s national newsweekly. He is the author of The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves, published by HarperCollins. He blogs at www.macleans.ca/andrewpotter