Canada has a bad habit of taking the worst elements of American media and making versions that are, surprisingly, even worse. One thing we’ve mostly managed to avoid, though, is the segregation of the news media into hyper-partisan factions of poisoned “truthiness.”

All of that changed this summer when one of the Canada’s largest media conglomerates, Quebecor Media, appointed Kory Teneycke to the position of Vice President, Development, and charged him with midwifing the birth of SunTV News, a new cable news channel that would compete with the established offerings from the CBC and CTV. And all of that changed yesterday, when Teneycke had one of the most spectacular falls from grace in Canadian media history.

You have to feel bad for Oprah Winfrey. It can’t be any fun having someone publish a tell-all book claiming that you have abused drugs, exaggerated stories about being raised poor, and perhaps made up the one about being sexually abused as a child.

the aughts

This decade, what changed everything was the development of what has been called “Web 2.0″, the collection of web-based applications that foster interactivity, modular interoperability and collaboration. These include social networking sites, wikis, aggregators, and blogs, along with dozens of other applications that allow people to share and revise content at will. This is what underwrites the open-source, multiple-drafts, reuse/remix/recycle media ecosystem we might as well call Culture 2.0.