Here in Toronto, I've found the shadow of American media and pop culture hanging over the media consciousness of this clean, cold, and cultured city. Producers, interviewers and journalists continually identify themselves in terms of American cultural reference points. Soft-spoken and serious-minded broadcasts and radio programs compete head-to-head with the great media machine to the south, which seems even more of a rapacious beast from here than it does back home.
A producer at CTV Canada's morning broadcast described the program as "our version of Good Morning America." CFTO's E-now is described as Canada's Entertainment Tonight. An executive at Newsworld described her broadcast as "our CNN."
Although Canadian media can't help but see themselves as counterpoints to famous US broadcasts, there are major differences, at least in Toronto. Media here is more civil and open, less cynical and confrontational.
Canadians seem to have the same schizoid ambivalence about American popular culture as Americans and much of the world have. They are simultaneously addicted to it and worried about the consequences of its violent, sexual, and vivid imagery on their politics and kids. They struggle to shape their own media and keep it from being consumed or overwhelmed by the cultural and information revolution pouring across the border.
"We do our own programming," said one beleaguered producer. "But when all is said and done, who can compete with ER?"
The news from Toronto is much calmer than in America. The media here seems much less obsessed with confrontational debates. In more than a dozen radio and TV appearances Tuesday alone, I was never once attacked personally or pitted against an "opponent."
Although I was aggressively challenged by anchors and radio hosts, they didn't - in contrast to many of their American counterparts - seem to need to round up the usual Rolodex-drawn suspects to balance my opinions. They were happy to do it themselves.
In a way, this made the interviews more pleasant, but ironically also much tougher, since the questions were harder to dismiss and were pressed by well-informed journalists eager to follow up rather than pervert the discussion by handing it over to ideologues or media attack-panelists.
Canadian interviewers appeared much more concerned with educational and informational issues than with pornography. "Who will be the leaders on the Web?" asked a reporter for the Toronto Star. "Who will take responsibility for ideas? Doesn't somebody have to be willing to lead?"
They were far more familiar with online culture than most American reporters and interviewers. Almost all of the media people I met were online regularly, had read some of the reports on the Virtuous Reality tour on HotWired. Several had read Jack Shafer's increasingly famous review of Virtuous Reality in Slate comparing me to the Unabomber at the start of the book tour. They asked me if I could explain it. It wasn't unusual by Washington media standards, I said, and not personal.
Perhaps because of this familiarity, the conversation included but ranged far beyond pornography, bomb-downloading, hate-mongering, and the usual mediaphobic agenda to encompass cost, censorship, concerns about techno-haves and have-nots, and parental pressures in raising kids in the digital age.
Arlene Bynon of CHFI's Chronicle pressed hard on the effects of so much violent imagery on the young, then concluded that it probably wasn't possible to V-chip or block most of it out. (The inventor of the V-Chip is Canadian, and the government in Canada is proposing regulation of the Net.) Shouldn't people in the online world, she asked, fight harder for civil and rational modes of discussion? (Bynon regularly ends her broadcasts by airing any anti-Martha Stewart stories she can get hold of and asked that I pass this along).
Canadian broadcasts and talk shows don't funnel guests into a "liberal" or "conservative" container or define complicated issues as having no more than two sides, as American media do. The interviews were all much longer than the four- or six-minute segments that make up the fast-paced news "wheels" of American broadcasts and many radio shows.
It seemed commonplace to drop by a nationwide TV or radio broadcast for a 45-minute or hour-long talk.
The interviewers asked me what I was trying to say, then asked me to clarify and explain further. They seemed comfortable letting me characterize myself. But ultimately, they were willing to leave it up to viewers, readers, and listeners whether or not to buy the message.
But even while it's less confrontation-obsessed, media here seems much less interactive than American media. Few TV or radio broadcasts had callers. "The questions are too uneven," explained one radio producer. "We think they'd rather listen than talk for talk's sake."
The journalists and interviewers seemed - as is the case with the distinctly sane Canadian email I get - puzzled by America's obsession with morality and culture, even as the United States cranks out a significant chunk of the world's movies, TV shows, advertising, and celebrity imagery.
While many of the interviewers were concerned about pornography, it didn't seem to strike most of the journalists I talked with as especially dangerous. Instead of looking incredulous when I said few children in America had been harmed as the result of online encounters, they nodded, seeming to already know it was true. I never heard one interviewer refer to the young as dumb or "dumbed down." Nor, for the first time on this book tour, did I hear a single reference to online perverts or cyber seducers.
"In America," one television interviewer asked about violent and sexual imagery, "they seem to produce more of this stuff than anyplace else, but maybe because of that, they seem to need to sound the alarm all the time, right?" Maybe.
One radio interviewer tried to explain William Bennett to Canada this way: "Well, he was the 'Drug Czar,' then the Education Secretary, and now he's the ... oh, never mind. I can't really explain it. He's sort of in charge of morals now."
Toronto's media was often refreshingly informal. Allan Greg's Studio 2 was a sophisticated nightly news magazine taped in a room richly painted with frescoes of naked women and crammed with overstuffed sofas. Daniel Richler's Big Life was taped in a downtown cybercafe stuffed with coffee drinkers and Web browsers. In these places, we simply talked, comfortably and at length, in ways available to US listeners only on the most rarified of NPR stations, and seldom then. I kept expecting the pitbull-fight Cross-fire ethic that marks almost all civic discussion in US media, but never found it.
At the end of the first day, I missed something, but couldn't define what. After a while I realized that I missed the interactivity, the special cast of a broadcast or interview that comes when people outside the media or political community can call in and ask questions and offer opinions themselves. These are invariably the best media encounters, the ones that combine an intelligent host and interested callers.
I eventually found both at midnight Tuesday on John Oakley's Live on Life talk show ("we are similar to Tom Snyder," said a producer) on the Life Network, which broadcasts all across Canada.
The discussion on "toxic media" and worries about the content of the Net drew so many calls the interview was extended to four segments from three as people called from across the vast stretches of Canada - Ottawa, Montreal, the Northern Provinces - to talk about the Internet and the Web. On the book tour, I've learned that webheads are desperate to talk about their new culture face-to-face and share their experiences and observations about it.
"I've been online for 13 years," said one man from Calgary. "The Net has changed my life, and for the better. There's good things and bad on it, but nobody can ever regulate it, ever."
Oakley was one of those talk show hosts who genuinely loves to hear from callers, rather than one who pretends to love to hear from callers. "God," he said during a break, "people on the Net really want to talk about it, don't they?" The switchboard lit up and stayed lit, a sight that makes hosts like Oakley beam.
Like my appearance on the Voice of America, the experience stood out. There was the sensation of being connected to distant people sharing a common experience. "Hey Jon," said Al from some town I couldn't pronounce near Alaska. "Been reading up on your book tour. You're more than welcome up here."
What a world, what a world, I thought. Me sitting in a studio north of Toronto talking to Al up near Alaska about the Net and a column I wrote that appears somewhere out in the ether that Al has read. Oakley and I parted reluctantly. Then, before I left, the studio geeks and I traded email addresses.
