Counterfeit Copy

Advertorials: Dollars for a magazine wooden nickels for readers

The year is 1956. A wide-eyed, baby-faced young journalist, fresh from his first professional stint at Maclean Hunter, decides he’s ready for the Big Time: The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. There are no immediate openings, but he is given the opportunity to write for The Globe on a freelance basis. When the first […]

All the Paper That’s Fit to Reprint

November 20 to 26, 1989, was recycling week in Ontario. The province went about extolling the virtues of garbage reduction, reuse and recycling, but at the same time Canada’s only newsprint recycler announced it would temporarily shut down to reduce inventory. Even with the pressure on newspapers to use recycled newsprint, Quebec & Ontario Paper […]

No Small Affair

There was no time for Doug Small to contemplate what sort of impact his budget leak story would have. As the broadcast journalist raced across Ottawa with the proof-a small pamphlet detailing the highlights of last April’s budget-he never dreamed it would spark a national controversy. Politically, the leak spelled yet another scandal for the […]

EXPOSED!

Can the media justify the anguish of private lives thrust into the glare of public scrutiny?

For forty days last summer, Canada’s newspapers, radio stations and television networks were flooded with details of the sex lives of two women: Barbara Dodd, 22, of North York, Ontario, and Chantale Daigle, 21, of Chibougamau, Quebec. Unlike other recipients of unwanted publicity in recent years-Susan Nelles, the Reichmanns, or Ben Johnson-neither Dodd nor Daigle […]

The Importance of Being Harry

Can the media justify the anguish of private lives thrust into the glare of public scrutiny?

Toronto lawyer Harry Kopyto offers his media storehouse like a host ushering a guest to the buffet table. “What do you need?” he asks. “Print? Video? Radio?” The chubby 42-year-old proudly claims that more than 1,000 articles about him have appeared in local papers during his 15 years as a lawyer. In Kopyto’s study, where […]

Tom, Joan, Norman & I

The confessions of a self-proclaimed Canadian Tom (saturation! ...liberated! ...dramatic!) Wolfe groupie

The only thing I can say with certainty about the New Journalism is that it changed my life. I was introduced to it in the late sixties, mostly through the works of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. They had very different-in some respects, totally opposed-approaches to the writing of journalism, but they made an equivalent […]

It Never Happened

In the Chinese media no one was killed in Tiananmen Square

I am not aware of the students at any time having been blamed, although they have been punished, for what culminated in the slaughter on June 4, which you out there call the Tiananmen massacre. But you’re wrong, you see. Nobody was killed on Tiananmen Square If you think you saw people being killed on […]

The Watson Report

Patrick Watson faces the public through the microphones of CBC’s “Radio Noon.” It is October 12, 1989, and he has just been appointed chairman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The station is inundated with callers who want to know how $140 million in government cuts to the network will be administered. Watson answers-quoting policy to […]

Terminal Condition

Some typewriter diehards and longhand Luddites have microchips on their shoulders, but they're a rare breed

One of the oldest cliches that comes to mind when one thinks of this century’s love affair with easily consumable information is that of the working journalist. He is invariably hunched over his Underwood typewriter at a paper-strewn desk under the glare of a bare bulb. The teeming ashtray beside him-as well as the crowded […]