Posted on 04/27/2004 5:09:32 PM PDT by wagglebee
"Why is Fox News banned from Canada, yet CNN isn't?"
Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun poses this question in his latest article.
He isn't sure if it's because Canada is more accepting of the liberal-leaning CNN, or if it's just because CNN was there first and is sort of 'grandfathered in,' so to speak.
Either way, Fox News has blown away the competition here in the U.S., and Worthington says he feels "withdrawal pangs" after returning to a Fox-free Canada. "I find Fox News an invaluable balance to CNN programming," he says.
When he called up his cable company to find out why Fox News isn't available, his answer was a chuckle: "Ask the CRTC or, better still, ask the CCTA (Canadian Cable Television Association)."
Worthington tells readers that Canada's governing CRTA has had an application from the CCTA to allow Fox News into the Great White North's TV system, but the CRTA has not done anything about it. "We don't understand how the CRTC can keep denying Canadians the right to have Fox News," said a CCTA spokesman.
The BBC and Euro News are both in Canada, and one can listen to Rush Limbaugh and others who don't lean left on the radio, if you can pick it up from a U.S. station.
But there is no alternative to the liberal media establishment in Canada, and that's apparently the way they like it, if the Globe and Mail's TV critic John Doyle is any measure.
He wrote that Fox News should be aired in Canada ... "so that we can all take a look, and get a laugh."
Worthington dismisses Doyle as childish, wondering how the G&M can even print his infantile tripe.
He concludes by saying that he wants Fox News in Canada as soon as possible, "not just for the amusement of Canadians like John Doyle, but their intellectual edification."
"Trust me," he says, "Fox News is not pathologically conservative or right wing. It is mostly sensible, and airs opinions from people who aren't afraid to challenge prevailing orthodoxy or think differently. Small wonder Liberals and the CRTC fear it."
Not yet. But don't think they wouldn't like to.
A few years back there was talk that the CRTC should have authority over the Internet
as well as the airwaves.
Hasn't happened yet, but give them time.
I was shocked to read in the WSJ some years ago that Canada requires a certain percentage of singers on radio to be Canadian. Just silly! And stupid.
Absolutely. See this:
Canada: Proposed legislation to toughen penalties for buying illegal satellite services
I'm glad now. While it's still an absolutely beautiful country and while I know that its "Silent Canadian Majority" still exists, I just could not bear the political and social climate over there.
Canada is a window into our future -- unless we change things.
When I heard this, I called my sister and said this is the official line that having been crossed, makes your country officially a socialist nation not becoming socialist but they have arrived. Even in Saddam's Iraq, rich people could have satellites to various countries. Some houses would have three of them.
The US digital sattelite services will not knowingly sell their equipment and service to someone in Canada. They don't have the broadcast rights for Canada. Same for Canadian sattelite services in the US. If you have or want to get an old-style big sattelite dish, you're free to tune in and watch anything you can legally get the equipment to tune in.
The Canadian gov't has been clamping down on US digital sattelite dishes in Canada to protect the Canadian sattelite services, and also because almost all the people using US sattelite dishes here are stealing the signal with "cracked" equipment, which is a violation of our equivalent of the DMCA. I'm not saying I agree with it, but it's more about cultural protectionism than it is censorship.
As to Fox news, the CCTA made an application to bring in it, along with HBO and some other services (ie in a single application). Again, in protectionist mode, HBO and the others are being kept out of Canada because they would cut into the viewership of Canadian cable channels that buy programming from HBO and others for broadcast in Canada. That was last year. Here's a link to a news article about this: Toronto Star
The CCTA has just (a couple of weeks ago) made application to bring in FOX News again, this time by itself in an application. It remains to be seen how quickly this will be dealt with, and what the outcome will be.
I'm not saying that I'm too happy about this stuff, and that I wouldn't rather that we had free access to all the US cable channels, but this is more about protecting Canadian cable channels than it is about censorship. Prove me wrong if you can, but otherwise this thread is mostly half-truths, supposition, and Canada-bashing.
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