‘Fox News of the North’ nabs its first host

Parliamentary reporter David Akin has resigned from Canwest to be the
first host of Fox News of the North, The Globe and Mail reports.

Akin will join Quebecor’s Sun Media as the Ottawa bureau chief and as a television host. The news comes after the Globe reported that Kory Teneycke will oversee the operations of a 24-hour cable channel that will emulate the U.S.’s Fox News network. Teneycke recently joined Quebecor as head of the media giant’s Parliament Hill bureau.

The idea, the Globe reports, is “a shot aimed directly at CBC and CTV, which for years has dominated the all-news format in English Canada.”

The Globe on Akin:

“Meanwhile, Mr. Akin is a prolific reporter, operating on all platforms – he Twitters, he blogs, he has a Facebook page, he appears in the Canwest newspapers and he is on television.
Sometimes, however, his eagerness to be out first lands him in trouble. Last February, he was pinned as the source of reports that Canadian singing icon Gordon Lightfoot had passed away.”

“That was wrong; Mr. Lightfoot was very much alive. And Mr. Akin later explained on his blog that he was simply “re-Tweeting” an alert that he had seen or that had been reported to his news service.”

“So really, he wasn’t the source of the misinformation; rather, he was simply passing along what he had read.”