Reading Heather Mallick is a rancid idea...

Here she goes again, this time in the Toronto Star...repeating all the various lies about the Canadian government trying to interfere with the CRTC and getting a license for 'Fox News North'...

Fox News and I have a history, a painful sordid history with rancour on their side and disgust on mine. Now their rumoured-to-be illegitimate child, something called Sun TV News—“Fair and Balanced Eh” would be their slogan, I guess—wants to set up camp in Canada and I will have none of it.

Of course I may have to have all of it, given that their business plan is said by many to include the Harper government pressuring the CRTC to give Sun TV News a “mandatory” cable deal, which is an almost unheard-of status, particularly for a new specialty channel in the digital age.

Of course, there is no evidence of any pressure on anybody...but here is Mallick's evidence...

Although there is no corporate connection between Fox and Sun, there is a visceral one. In March 2009, CP has reported, Prime Minister Stephen Harper lunched in New York City with Murdoch, accompanied by Fox news president Roger Ailes and then- Harper communications director Tenycke.

Oh my God...Harper had lunch with Murdoch! Does life get any worse than this????

Mallick, like Margaret Atwood, wants to censor.

The argument that Fox News North will be fair and balanced, a hard-right antidote to the allegedly liberal CBC, is nonsense. A privately owned propaganda channel is not the equivalent of an underfunded non-profit public broadcaster stuck with the legal requirement to inform a huge fractured country on a factually immaculate basis. The CBC’s disastrous recent effort to make itself young, populist and silly notwithstanding, it really does try hard.

But, nobody has even seen the Sun News Channel, and so what if it is 'hard-right'??? Canadians cannot be trusted to watch what they want...and thankfully the Mallicks and the Atwoods are here to warn us appropriately.

And, as for CBC trying hard??? Factually immaculate??? Underfunded??? I guess she is saying that only when we fund CBC 'properly' should we even consider another private news service. And, even then I am not so sure - here is her last word...

Fox/Sun will be boring. But it’s still wrong.