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Sun News enlivens men’s rights tete-a-tete with stock photos of screaming women

Sometimes it’s fun to think of the hard conservative true-believers at Sun News as a scrappy band of upstarts struggling hilariously to make a name for themselves, like those plucky pre-confederation reformers who tried to launch a rebellion in Toronto but mostly just sat around a bar. Except with terrible ties.

The Sun’s latest adorable effort to present itself as a legitimate news organization – and not an expensive conceptual art gag perpetrated by a very funny 14 year old in a Agnostic Front shirt who has access to a broadcast studio and a cast of bearded and non-bearded dads – came yesterday, when Charles Adler interviewed men’s right activist and staunch opponent of “academic feminism” Dr. Janice Fiamengo.

Fiamengo, a U of Ottawa prof, was in Toronto to deliver her lecture, What’s Wrong With Women’s Studies? Academic Feminism, Censorship & Men, which we wrote all about. In a bid to make Adler and Fiamengo’s sensational, fear-mongering conversation about rights and the unchecked limits of free speech more exciting, the Sun News producers inserted photos between the two, as a way of underscoring their talking points, just like a real-deal news show might do.

After running out of the cell phone photos from Fiamengo’s lecture, the producers leaned on stock photos of women yelling and looking annoyed: not as a way of showing that women (whether or not they identify as feminists) have real grievances to get legitimately steamed about, but to show how all women are nagging shrews with furrowed brows, trapped forever in mid-screech.

Granted, all kinds of news organizations use stock photography. We do it all the time. But the Sun could have at least made a blind stab at credibility, instead of Google image searching “angry women.” Maybe we should just be thankful the didn’t go with the one of the older lady wielding a frying pan or, for that matter, a doodle of Andy Capp’s wife.

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