Toronto Sun contributor Sabrina Maddeaux wrote recently that Canada will not truly be part of the #metoo/timesup movement until (really) big names begin to fall. But a higher, louder circus of blame will achieve little. When corporate media surrenders its massive and profitable investment in the sexuality of women, when Victoria’s Secret disappears and the Sunshine Girls put their clothes on, then we can begin the journey to safety for women.

Coverage of terrorist attacks is so formulaic in 2017 that reporters, if asked, could certainly write a story without an actual event. It would have the sophistication of a puppet show in the town square. The victims, of course, would be European or Western allies. There would be fine details of weapons, injuries, trauma, shattered witnesses and mourners and deranged hoodlums as perpetrators.

Perhaps the biggest media story of 2016 was the overdue discovery of fake news: totally manufactured information slickly packaged as journalism. Getting a lot less attention was the story that real news can be fake news, too, and often is. As the Huffington Post points out, when opinion (which is cheap) is blended with fact (which is expensive) and is endlessly recycled, it gets hard to tell the difference between 60 Minutes and The Daily Show.

First, a confession. Whenever I come across Brian Mulroney’s photograph in the newspaper, I amuse myself by blackening his teeth. It’s therapeutic. I tell myself: Somebody’s got to do it – for all the life-threatening wounds the man inflicted on this country, its media has never raised a hand to him. Not until November of 2007, that is.

The Montreal hearings put the spotlight on a long line of prominent people, all of whom appeared to have been gleefully putting their hands into the taxpayer’s pocket. The creative villains in the “adscam” affair were Liberals or friends of the Liberal Party of Canada. Reporters, columnists, talk-show hosts and cartoonists bellowed and brayed about this betrayal of the democratic process, resulting in a frenzy of speculation over a possible snap election.

“No one felt any obligation to anyone on the outside.”

American maverick journalist Lowell Bergman, speaking to Canadian counterparts in Toronto, was talking about the time CBS refused to air his now-famous expose of American tobacco companies and their relentless drive to hook smokers with new and improved forms of nicotine. He and whistle-blower/chemist Jeffrey Wigand later saw their unwelcome story offered to the public on the big screen in The Insider, featuring Al Pacino as Bergman and Russell Crowe as Wigand.

ith this edition, Canadian Dimension joins the infinite numbers of romantics who, throughout history, have put a message in a bottle and thrown it out to sea, never knowing where it might land, who might read it, or what might happen as a result.

We were aiming for Clark County, Ohio. We know it’s landlocked. We know the odds anyone there will get our message are slim to none. But hey – we’re romantics!

For anyone who paid any attention to the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), media coverage of his death on June 5, 2004 was nothing less than a crazy-making experience.Who was the man in that coffin? Certainly not the man on historical record.

The first thing the young man sees as he emerges from The Corporation is the theatre’s bright, shiny Pepsi Machine. Where once he saw a harmless soft drink, he now sees a bloated and arrogant corporate product. He gives the machine a slap.

“So long, sucker. It’s over. I’m ready to give you up.”

Excuse me, may I have your cell phone? I see you’re wearing a pager; may I have that too? Your lap top computer, if you don’t mind? And I’ll take the palm pilot I see in your shirt pocket.

Feel like somebody’s bewildered, possibly hostile naked lunch without your high tech toys?

Welcome to the wrong side of the Digital Divide, the developing world in which hundreds of millions of poor people in the south are left behind the more prosperous people of the north at the lightning speed of the latest computer chip.