“I’m not a fat ninja,” declared Ezra Levant. “It’s just me, Ezra, wearing a niqab.” That was the beginning of a segment of his Sun News Network television show, The Source, last July. He was indeed dressed in a style of burqa worn by women throughout the Arab Peninsula and wore it to make a statement against what he later referred to as “gender apartheid.” The niqab, according to Levant, is “a symbol of the inequality of women in radical Islam.” He dubbed it a “body bag” and Iran, “a hell hole.” Crew members giggled audibly from behind the scenes, suggesting that this was more of a gag than a feminist call to action. Heatedly, Levant detailed the reasoning behind his discomfort toward the niqab and wondered why Canadian feminists, “the bra burners from the 1960s,” hadn’t rallied together in protest over it. With his voice slightly muzzled by the cloth, Levant made his position on the garment painfully clear: “I’m in a one-person prison.”

The segment combined all the qualities that define Sun News Network: stubbornly contrarian, outrageously flippant and lacking in nuance, qualities many Canadians find distasteful. Quebecor Media is betting that the rest can’t wait to tune in for more, but the danger is the channel may exacerbate the growing political polarization in this country.

Quebecor’s announcement that it would launch Sun News generated widespread derision and plenty of angst. Jeffrey Simpson of The Globe and Mail labeled the channel “Fox News North” early on, a comparison that has either plagued or propelled the network since even before its April 2011 launch—depending on who’s talking. An activist organization called Avaaz garnered over 80,000 signatures protesting the channel months before it had even rolled the first clip. Among those signatories was Margaret Atwood, who emailed the Globe to say that the very idea of an unabashedly right-leaning television network was “part of the ‘I make the rules around here,’ Harper-is-a-king thing.” Sun Media’s Ottawa bureau chief, David Akin, host of Sun News’s Daily Briefs, said he was disappointed that Atwood would join what he called an “anti-free speech movement.” But even conservative Tasha Kheiriddin, a member of theNational Post’s editorial board, wrote: “Sun TV really isn’t about Hard News and Straight Talk. It’s about Hot Chicks and Sexy Outfits.”

The tide of negative opinion has done nothing to temper the network’s tone and has perhaps even energized it. Sun News is calculated about doing the opposite of what other networks claim to take pride in, which is presenting the news as objectively as possible. Parent company Sun Media regards objectivity suspiciously, either simply as a force that turns every news story grey, bland and monotonous or as a cover for hidden (read: liberal) leanings. The company even withdrew its newspapers from the Ontario Press Council last July, citing incompatibility with the industry group’s “politically correct mentality.”

Antipathy to “political correctness” is the driving force at Sun News, the dark power against which the network heroically struggles—and its Death Star is undoubtedly Canada’s public broadcaster. “The CBC is exceedingly politically correct,” says Levant. “They have an official ‘line’ on everything from niqabs to the oil sands. That’s my chief criticism of the mainstream media in Canada: not that they’re liberal—though they generally are—but that they are so drearily uniform.” Beyond dull, CBC is a “billion-dollar Liberal campaign machine,” according to Levant. “Without a $1.1 billion a year subsidy like the CBC has, we just haven’t been able to afford hundreds and hundreds of middle managers to make our news as bland and politically correct as theirs.”

Quebecor wants to position Sun News as the polar opposite of what it sees as the CBC-Liberal Party establishment—right down to hiring Stephen Harper’s combative former communications director, Kory Teneycke, as vice-president in charge of the channel. That underdog posture—despite the backing of a multibillion dollar parent company, as well as political connections, informal or otherwise—is no coincidence. It’s how Fox News built its status as the number one cable news network in the United States. “Fox News North” is not an insult; it’s a mission statement.

I’m not in the business of deciding who my watchers and listeners should be,” says Luc Lavoie, head of development for Sun News and former deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. “I’m in the business of offering a well-put-together product.” Lavoie, who maintains that he has no lingering connections to the Conservative Party, also points out that one of Sun News Network’s biggest media buys came from the Liberal Party during the last federal election campaign.

“Everyone was sounding the same,” he says of Canada’s media outlets prior to the launch of Sun News. “Everyone was pretending to be objective and reporting along the same lines. Everyone was in ‘do not disturb mode.’ We’re disturbing. We’re blue collar. We are provocative. And that’s what people were waiting for.”

Levant agrees. “Our news and views are circumscribed by a battalion of government regulations, including those enforced by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council,” he says. Of course, the CBSC is an industry organization, not a government one, but Levant is not about to let facts get in the way of a good rant. “Our government doesn’t trust us to listen to or watch as wide a variety of news as Americans are allowed.” Not without hope for a more Americanized style of reportage, Levant perks up when it comes to what the future holds. “Canada is slowly growing up out of its political correctness,” he says. “I think we’re slowly realizing that we’re not part of the European politically correct censorship model; we’re more in sync with the United States first amendment model.”

Though Sun has no formal affiliation with Fox News (in fact, it has a foreign footage agreement with CNN), the American network’s attitude, style and strategy are obvious inspirations. South of the border, Fox has bullied its way to the top of the cable news heap with a potent combination of slick production values, shrill headline-grabbing personalities and reactionary populism. By cannily exploiting—and exacerbating—the country’s deepening political divides, Fox has appointed itself a political rainmaker.

Sun News may have arrived at an opportune time to do the same for Canadian politics, where the middle ground is also eroding. With the Liberals in disarray following the 2011 federal election, the Conservatives sitting on a solid majority and the rise of the NDP to official opposition, Canadians increasingly have to choose between left and right. Sun News is here to capitalize.

Early opposition to Sun News contained a paradox: some critics decried the existence of the network while othersasserted no one would watch it anyway. This is Canada, after all—we’re not supposed to go for this sort of thing. Early ratings were, indeed, laughably low. Last summer, Quebecor announced it would not apply to renew Sun’s over-the-air broadcast licence, apparently content to live in the triple-digit Siberia of the specialty cable channels instead.

A Category 2 status designates the network as a broadcaster of “analysis and interpretation,” as opposed to a Category 1, which broadcasts news. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t watching. In fact, Sun is celebrating ratings that should make its competitors sweat: one month after its launch, figures from independent ratings agency BBM showed that Sun News’s prime time slots were attracting an average nightly audience of 18,900 in their first month. According to Lavoie, ratings are climbing even though he says Sun News reaches half the viewers of its competition. “It looks like there was a window in the market that was waiting for something.”

Kim Lian Khoo was waiting. “All TV channels in Canada up to this point have been Liberal-minded or socialist-biased in their views,” says the retired teacher from Fournier, Ontario, who watches Sun regularly. “This could be the legacy left behind by years of the Liberal government. There are so many issues which most mainstream media will not touch….”

She is not alone. “Unlike the regular Canadian mainstream media news channels, Sun TV pushes aside political correctness and reports on issues as they really are,” insists Orlin Olsen, a retired railroad worker living in Winnipeg, in what might as well be a spontaneous ad for the network. “I believe they look at the issues of the day through the eyes of ordinary Canadians rather than those of the liberal-left academic elites who seem to call the shots in our country. Ordinary Canadians appreciate their honesty and candour.”

Arguing about the definition of bias is nothing new. “At the core of the debates about affirmation journalism and outlets like Sun TV is the question of whom journalism should serve, and how,” says Candis Callison, an assistant journalism professor at the University of British Columbia. “When opinion masquerades as fact, it can be very dangerous.”

For Sun News, concerns about objectivity or political correctness come second to “Grreeeat TV,” which is what Canada Live host Krista Erickson promised viewers before she began an infamous interview with Margie Gillis last summer. The dancer and choreographer sat alone in a Montreal studio last June to do a satellite interview. The show’s producers had told Gillis the discussion would be about the value of funding the arts. When the interview began, however, Erickson, who’d spent 11 years as a CBC reporter before joining Sun, interrogated Gillis with questions about how much government funding she’d received during her 39-year career and why she felt any arts community was deserving of government money at all. Swirling her arms around to mimic the style of modern dance Gillis performs, Erickson didn’t mince words: “Why does this cost $1.2 million over 13 years?”

The interview quickly melted down. Gillis responded, repeatedly, that she thought Sun News’s statistics were inaccurate and that Canadian dance deserves funding. At one point, as the two women spoke over each other, Gillis piped up as the voice of reason. “I’m your guest,” she reminded Erickson. “Perhaps you might let me speak.”

The segment resulted in more than 6,600 citizen complaints against Sun News filed with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. It typically receives 2,000 per year.

Such stunts have become Sun’s stock-in-trade. In June, Levant invited an animal rights activist from PETA onto his show to discuss the ethical treatment of zoo animals and then proceeded to eat chicken wings throughout the interview. Such gimmicks follow in the tradition of Glenn Beck, the former Fox host who once poured pretend-gasoline on the head of a guest because he felt “disenfranchised” by Barack Obama. “Most people do not consume news,” says Levant. “So anything that makes the news more entertaining is probably helpful. I do not regard myself as being in the ‘strictly news’ business. I am not a reporter. I’m in the opinion business, which is more suitable for humour and entertainment.”

Because the Sun personalities on prime time don’t consider themselves reporters, that allows them to do and say whatever they want. By not making claims about being fair and balanced, Sun News doesn’t have to make any promises it can’t keep. (When he was at Fox, Glenn Beck preferred the term “opinion guy.”) But doesn’t the blurry line between fact and opinion threaten to misinform viewers, who tune in for news but get commentary instead? “If that were the case,” says Levant, “We would all be drinking New Coke and driving Edsels and we would have voted for the Charlottetown Accord. People are skeptical and they’re smarter than most journalists give them credit for.”

Canada already has news networks and publications whose mandates champion objectivity. It wouldn’t have been in Quebecor’s financial interest to start another, nor would it help polarize Canadian politics and bury the Liberals. So where most networks proclaim fairness and balance, Sun News promises “Hard News and Straight Talk.”

And when its reporters—ahem, commentators and analysts—talk about what exactly this means, they repeat the following like a mantra: “Unbiased reporting is a myth.” Mike Strobel, former editor-in-chief of the Toronto Sun who is now a columnist at the paper and a regular on Sun News, doesn’t hesitate to defend the channel’s overt biases and redirects any pointed fingers in the direction of CBC: “Their claims to objectivity mask the fact that a lot of CBC journalists tend to be kind of left-wing. Biases tend to be more subtle, whereas Sun News, to its credit, is in your face.”

The matter of discerning bias in reporting is a fertile topic, but let’s not forget the fact that Sun’s flagship news anchor is calling Iran “a hell hole” on prime time television. That’s something new in Canadian broadcasting, and while the academics ponder the ethics of “fairness” and “balance,” Sun News Network is barging ahead, ignoring its prudish critics and accumulating viewers in the process. And if anyone doesn’t like it, Lavoie has a simple suggestion: “Switch to another channel.”

Many people will, of course, just as many Americans despise Fox News. Sun doesn’t need to lead in the ratings to have an effect on other channels, on political parties and on the tenor of Canadian political culture. The culture of news reporting in America today is different because of competitive pressures from Fox. With Sun going after the CBC, and the Conservatives holding a majority government, the conversation will surely shift on every channel. Ripples emanating from that outpost in cable Siberia show the signs of things to come.

Denise Smith doesn’t use the internet and she doesn’t have a smartphone. The small business associate from Grimsby, Ontario, reads one newspaper a week: The Grimsby-Lincoln News. It’s a community newspaper with a weekly circulation of 23,450 that covers the 238 square kilometre stretch between Grimsby and West Lincoln. There is no business or international section, and the only sports scores are from local teams, many of them from high schools or kids’ leagues. It may not be the most polished paper (a recent front page misspelled the words “doors” and “aboard” in the same headline), but the News still plays an important role in the lives of small town community members: it keeps them connected in a way that bigger newspapers cannot.

Grimsby is not the only town reliant on its community paper. The Ontario Community Newspaper Association has 313 members, each with relatively modest distributions and geographically narrow news scopes. Staffs are typically small, offices are local and the papers—especially the 118 owned by Torstar subsidiary Metroland—are stuffed with advertisements. Without these newspapers, communities across Ontario would lose an integral sense of togetherness.

Not that losing them is a concern. With print journalism in crisis, big papers, such as The Globe and Mail, are trying redesigns to draw in more readers while others, including The New York Times, have introduced pay walls to generate more revenue. But community newspapers remain well read because they offer stories that bigger papers don’t. In a recent issue of the News, the front page story was about the local fire department acquiring two new thermal cameras. Beside that was a news story on the release of Grimsby’s years-in-the-making economic growth plan and a throw to the details of an upcoming event that will allow locals to eat lunch with the mayor. In the back of the paper are the personals: stag and does, 90th birthdays and wedding and funeral announcements. Many bigger newspapers have removed this section in lieu of putting the information online. The community newspaper, however, aims to keep people in the loop, even if that loop has a pea-sized circumference. “They add a lot of personality to the paper,” says Mike Williscraft, the News‘s editor-in-chief, about the weekly personals he runs. “Everybody says, ‘I saw you in the paper.’ It’s a bit of a pride thing, too.”

Community papers supply information that drills right down into the core of the community, says Williscraft. “Dailies aren’t really armed to do that.” He adds that with the advent of social media platforms such as Twitter, which can break news quickly between press times, readers who don’t turn to the internet for their news are left out. “Traditionally, they are the technology-laggers,” says Anne Lannan, executive director of the OCNA, about people who live in small communities, particularly rural areas. “And if you look at the smaller communities, some of them don’t even have high speed internet yet.”

Grimsby does have access to high speed, but many people, such as Smith, are slower to embrace online culture at an urban pace. This is why the News is important to her sense of community. “It’s the voice of Grimsby,” she says. “A lot of people who work here live in the community, too. This way they can keep their finger on the pulse of what’s happening.”

Three hours northeast of Toronto is Peterborough, Ontario, another growing municipality. Lois Tuffin is the editor-in-chief of Peterborough This Week, a local bi-weekly with a distribution of 96,000, which is also published by Metroland. She agrees that community papers offer news and commentary that larger dailies don’t. “That’s the advantage of community papers,” she says. “We’re not competing with the internet and Perez Hilton for information. No one else is going to tell you about the kid from Bridgenorth who won the soapbox derby in Indiana. That’s what makes people pick up our papers.”

But these papers offer more than just soapbox derby news. When results of the Niagara Household Survey on healthcare were released last month, the original plan was to publish them online only. Realizing that senior citizens make up the fastest growing population in Niagara and that they are the largest users of health care, Williscraft convinced a Ministry of Health research associate to let him publish the findings in the News, as well as his other newspaper, Niagara This Week. “A lot of seniors don’t have computers or wouldn’t be savvy enough to find the information online,” he says. “Why wouldn’t we publish that?”

Williscraft knows that his readers want local coverage and not the en masse (albeit, still necessary and essential) reporting that bigger dailies offer. “That’s not our game,” he says. “They’re competing on a world scale, and we’re competing on a Main Street scale.” For the residents of small towns, Main Street may as well be Bay Street. That’s the hub of their community. “If we don’t tell it,” says Williscraft, “no one will.”

In the meantime, front page typos or not, The Grimsby-Lincoln News, and papers like it, will still have an important place in the lives of people who prefer the smear of newspaper ink on their fingertips to the tap of an iPad’s touch screen.

My affectionate position toward unpaid internships may come as a surprise for two reasons:

A. I am broke.

B. I am also an unpaid intern.

For the second time in my life, I am working for free—by choice. In fact, I practically begged for the internship I have now. I applied by email, then by real mail, and then sent kindly worded follow-up emails for the next three months until I was called back for an interview. When I was asked if I would move to New York even though I was ineligible for an American work visa and, therefore, could not make any money this summer, I happily said yes.

It would be great if I could get paid, but I can’t, and neither can many of my colleagues and peers who are also spending their summers working without pay. This is a bigger issue for some than for others. To all, it is a quandary—a moral or ethical dilemma—or an issue of practicality. And I get that; I wish we could all sustain ourselves as interns and not struggle as Toronto-rent-paying (graduate) students who come home from our nine-to-fives to churn out freelance work or yawn our way through serving coffee. But when an unpaid internship is the only option students have if they want to gain experience and make contacts in the industry, I think the long-term benefits far outweigh the short-term financial stress. (I say that having just taken out a sizable bank loan that won’t be paid off anytime soon so that I can—kind of—afford the intern life I’m now living.)

I did an unpaid internship at a Canadian arts publication two years ago. At the time, I was working the night shift at a hotel front desk that was a ninety-minute commute away from my internship. I had to lease a car to get there everyday. It was rough, but it was worthwhile. The bylines I produced and the contacts that I made ultimately went on to help me land the position I have now and, more importantly, taught me a lot. In the case of my current internship, the magazine offered to pay me but can’t because I wasn’t able to obtain the proper visa. So, do I boycott the internship because I can’t get paid and have some organization—the government, my employer, my school—step in and help me find a paying gig? Or do I make it happen and spend the summer actively involved in the production of a major magazine for which I’d someday love to work? I think the answer is clear, but not to everyone.

Bethany Horne just finished her undergraduate degree in journalism and recently declared that she would boycott unpaid internships. According to Horne, “…The clansmen leading the armies atop the fortress didn’t get there through an internship.” She is referencing the speech Robert Krulwich delivered to the Berkeley School of Journalism Class of 2011. Sure, he made it clear that journalism is a difficult door to wedge a foot into. But he went on to encourage young journalists to persevere if they love their craft and to blog their own journalism, even though “No one will pay you. No one will care. No one will notice….” This description sounds an awful lot like that of an unpaid internship, but at least you’ll get noticed at an internship, especially if you do a good job.

If unpaid internships are the evil of the world Horne wants to fight, I am all for her protest. But I weep for the bylines she’s not getting, the contacts she’s not making and the skills she’s not learning because of her refusal. When you Google the names of my colleagues who are working for free this summer and getting bylines at The Globe and Mail and the National Post or producing segments for CBC and reporting the news in Los Angeles, their links become viewable to potential employers. They are not making money, but they’re learning as they go, making valuable contacts and securing themselves a place in the industry when they graduate. They are making names for themselves. When I type “Bethany Horne” into Google, all I learn is that she will not work for free.

Horne’s anti-unpaid internship manifesto sparked some debate across the Canadian journalistic blogosphere, mainly on Twitter, where Ed Keenan (senior editor at The Grid) jumped in to disagree with her. Like many publications, the Grid offers unpaid internships. Like many unpaid interns who really go for it, some of those who have interned at the Grid have moved on to big things (the paper’s masthead, The Canadian Press, The Walrus, Columbia University). Keenan himself was once an intern there (when it was still Eye Weekly) and said that if funds were available to pay interns for their full-time work, he’d prefer to give the job to someone with the requisite qualifications as opposed to a student who is just learning. Being qualified for an internship is not the same as being qualified for an entry-level job. For a publication, it’s a risk to take on interns who may or may not know their CP style, who is semi-proficient at writing ledes and who has never worked in a newsroom. Keenan’s argument is essentially the same as mine: “Tension in [the] unpaid internship debate stems from [different] views about [the] function of the role: free labour vs. free education.”

If Horne’s refusal to work for free results in a norm of financial stability for young journalists, I’ll be relieved for the students who don’t have to learn first-hand how grueling it can be to pay your dues. Until then, I’ll grin my way through working for free. Paid or not, the primary beneficiary of an internship is the intern.