The most conservative columnist I regularly read, Robert Fulford on the National Post (Toronto) has worked for Conrad Black for decades. Fulford is the greatest apologist for the baron.
The one redeeming quality of Conrad Black, according to the National Post's culture critic Fulford, is that the man stands a head taller than other North American capitalists. Lord Black is an intelligent human being.
(Check out the posts below that add nuance to such a generous assessment.)
One imagines as well that Fulford admires Lord Black for the makeover he paid for as owner-publisher of The National Post several years ago -- before he sold the paper to the Aspers of CanWest Global. I can agree with that positive assessment. The look of the paper was an admirable cosmetic invention (though much of the new look has since faded as the financial difficulties under CanWest Global deepened).
Basically, it is unfair to see Fulford as a loyal member in the Black/Hollinger camp solely on the grounds of their shared political opinion. Yes both are profoundly conservative men. But even the new biography of FDR by Black does not raise the media mogel into the sanctified bipolar cultural league of media reviewer R.F. That is, Fulford can be counted on to give you some of the best put-downs of both the rightwing and the extreme-left fringes, all the while exposing how the CIA took over literary magazines in the 1950s and 60s and how Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) was so freakish.
Why so many posts in one day on Conrad Black?
Well I am just catching up. This is a new blog, I want to read the book, and I am predicting that in 2004 we will be exposed to even more financial scandal surrounding the Hollinger newsmedia empire.
I predict that this year there will be a spate of closures -- that a few metropolitan newspapers will bite the dust, including stars of Hollinger and CanWest Global.
(ED: two weeks after I wrote this, the BBC publicly worries that The Telegraph will be put on the auction block.)
It pisses me off, as a particular example, that the old Power Corporation stalwart, the French-language La Presse, skipped both Christmas and New Year's Day. I found myself dragging around an old newspaper as I visited friends around the region. I actually had to participate in the holiday festivities with nothing to read while curled up on a corner chesterfield.
Corner cutting like that in major papers will sink them soon. Perhaps, even the pinnacle of publishing periodicals will also suffer as their stodgy graphics and heavy advertising inserts start to turn off readers.
But most of all, people will simply turn off and reject the Orwellian propaganda the papers force down their throats as the quagmire of Iraq and Afghanistan sucks down more and more Western nations, including EU member-states.
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