Free Number Two by Jay Onrait Page A

John streets in downtown Toronto was recorded for posterity. Everything.
    The projector turned on and a title graphic appeared on the screen that said “The Best of Speakers’ Corner: City/Much Christmas Party Edition.” This could be fun, I thought. I was ready to hear clip after clip of hilarious would-be comedians going off aboutissues in their life using language too obscene for television. Turns out I was selling the whole operation a bit short. There weren’t really any rants to be seen, other than the occasional homeless person who had decided to sleep in the booth for the night and wasn’t happy about the smell in the tiny confined space. For the most part “The Best of Speakers’ Corner” featured a plethora of unspeakable sex acts in a tiny, confined, and rather filthy booth.
    There was no subtle way to edit these clips together. The video started with a male and female making out in the booth and then a quick cut to that same female pulling out the male’s penis and going down on him. She then looked to the camera and gave a wink, which led to a rousing cheer from the crowd. We were just getting started. A quick cut to a drunken frat boy whipping out his wang and pissing all over the seat in the booth, marking his territory if you will. This led to another quick cut back to the original couple. This time the woman was on top of the man and full-on penetration could be seen as clear as day. We were being treated to ( very ) amateur pornography for Christmas. On and on it went. A woman facing directly into the camera with a giant grin on her face as she was clearly being plowed from behind by some dude in the middle of a cold, dark Toronto night. More blow jobs, some women on men, some men on men, all of them met with cheers from the crowd.
    The filth just continued on from there. Even more blow jobs, more fucking, more homeless dudes and frat boys pissing. I was actually a little surprised there wasn’t a clip of someone shitting. I wondered to myself if the booth had a hose hookup right next to it so it could be sprayed down every morning. Finally, the video came to an end and the screen flashed “Happy Holidays” with a picture of Ed the Sock next to it, leading to a massive cheer from the gathered employees—a job well done for another year. I wasstill in a state of shock. City/Much had a reputation for being the bad boys of Canadian broadcasting, but I did not walk into the company’s holiday gathering thinking we would be sitting around watching dirty movies like a bunch of thirteen-year-olds who had just discovered the parental control password on their parents’ cable system. Maybe this was just a company that liked to film themselves?
    A few years later, when I had just returned to TSN and the concept of viral videos had begun to take shape, the company’s star news anchor, Gord Martineau, was featured in a video that had been posted online, likely by a disgruntled ex-CityTV employee. In the clip, Martineau stands next to fellow longtime City anchor Anne Mroczkowski and repeatedly grabs his nuts between takes of a news update.
    â€œI’ve got your news right here!” he jokes.
    It was clearly all in good fun and no one in the video seemed offended whatsoever, but it definitely stripped the stately newsman façade from Martineau in my eyes, for better or for worse. Later, in the same leaked video, longtime man-on-the-street reporter Jojo Chintoh can be seen in a Toronto home waiting for an interview subject who was upstairs getting ready for the day. While he waits, the camera follows Chintoh as he snoops around the home a bit—nothing too unusual or scandalous. The problem comes when Chintoh spots the family liquor cabinet and wanting a little morning pick-me-up proceeds to twist the top off a bottle of Baileys and put a sizeable portion into his Tim Hortons coffee cup.
    This was the first viral video news scandal I can remember,