A Mean Season for Press Barons

2011. szeptember 14. 13:09

The traditional role of publishers—editing, production, and distribution—is certainly up for grabs. What don’t appear to be up for grabs are the old-fashioned virtues of craft and quality.

2011. szeptember 14. 13:09
Graydon Carter
Vanity Fair

„With the News of the World phone-hacking scandal continuing to hobble the fortunes of Rupert Murdoch, the case against one of his fellow Fleet Street press barons, Conrad Black, looks almost quaint by comparison. Indeed, you could reasonably say that while the crimes committed by Black—as well as those other high-profile jailbirds from the past decade, such as Martha Stewart, former Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman, and ImClone founder Sam Waksal—made big headlines in their day, they now look piddling next to, say, the widespread criminality at the heart of the subprime-mortgage racket. For his part, Black was convicted in 2007 in a U.S. federal court of defrauding shareholders of his company, Hollinger International, which, at its peak, owned more than 500 newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post, and London’s Telegraph.


Black, a Canadian by birth who is now a British citizen and peer, wasn’t the type to take the accusations against him lying down. Stoutly reciting Rudyard Kipling’s moving poem »If« during court appearances, and using the great appellate system of the United States courts, he has whittled away at the 13 different charges against him. From what once was a criminal case involving accusations of fraud worth some $80 million, Black is now down to charges of misappropriating $600,000 and removing from his office boxes that might have contained evidence. He has nevertheless been ordered to return to prison for another 13 months to finish the shortened, six-and-a-half-year sentence handed down in 2007. (He had been freed on bail last year pending a court review of his case.)

In The Convictions of Conrad Black, on page 252, the former press baron tells Vanity Fair special correspondent Bryan Burrough about his 29 months in prison. He holds little back, providing frank tales of anal-cavity searches and even franker opinions of some of his enemies. Perhaps it says something for Canadian civic-mindedness that Black speaks almost fondly of his experience in prison, treating his time there as a “vocation.” He read and wrote a lot, he lost weight, and he spent a good amount of time tutoring his fellow inmates. Black describes the social aspects of cleaning showers and even toilets, and talks of the camaraderie he felt with all manner of his new colleagues. One begins to believe that Lord Black of Crossharbour is quite possibly a changed man.”
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