-Senator George Frisbie Hoar (R-MA), speaking during a lecture at Harvard in 1900
Thus did Senator Hoar, a grand old man of the Grand Old Party, describe the progress and ultimate success of an idea whose time has come. This is perhaps also a good summary of how the backers of Canada’s new conservative TV outlet, Sun TV News, which launched yesterday, hope their venture will make its way in the world.
(Some former colleagues of mine happen to work at Sun TV, so everything I write about it must be read with that fact in mind.)
On Senator Hoar’s scale of a new idea’s progress, Sun TV News is somewhere between the “attention” and “contempt” stage. The Canadian cultural and political elites that the new network wants to confront will no doubt get around, one of these days, to a full-throated expression of contempt, hatred and fear.
Right now, they are content with potshots like “Stun TV” and “Fox News North,” and circulating hysterically-worded online petitions.
Maybe some irritated writer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s state-owned TV broadcaster, will slip a joke about Sun TV into an upcoming episode of CBC’s “Little Mosque on the Prairie” series. (A series that, understandably, many Americans, but not all, think is meant to be taken as parody.)
Sun TV will be well on its way into the “contempt” stage when that happens.
I watched about an hour of Sun TV yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised as one host, Brian Lilley, energetically slaughtered a number of political sacred cows (e.g., he argued that Canada should protect its political sovereignty from being diluted and placed in the hands of unaccountable global bureaucracies). That sort of thing would bring gasps and expressions of disgust from guests and hosts alike on Canadian state TV.
Compared to what Americans have access to via FoxNews, of course, this is near-beer at best – hardly the 120-proof stuff that some Canadians were expecting.
But it’s a start. And if the team behind Sun TV doesn’t lose its nerve, perhaps they’ll be able to help more Canadians realize that, as the saying goes, sacred cows make the best hamburger.
