Existing comment:
Lord Conrad Black ("Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom") @ National Press Club's Book Fair.
I had never heard of this person but he's a newspaper mogul and he was being interviewed constantly. When I bought his book, he was warm and friendly and talked at length about Roosevelt. A Canadian, he became a British citizen so he could accept a position in the House of Lords. According to FAIR ( http://www.fair.org/extra/9611/conrad-black.htm ): His company, Hollinger Inc., is now the third largest newspaper chain in the Western world, after Gannett and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (New York Times, 6/24/96), with a combined circulation exceeding 10 million (James Winter, Democracy's Oxygen). Black owns 650 dailies and weeklies around the world, including the Jerusalem Post, the London Daily Telegraph, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Chicago Sun Times. ... He now controls 42 percent of Canada's daily circulation (Maclean's, 7/8/96), and most of the large papers outside of Toronto (Toronto Star, 6/28/96). According to David Robinson, research director at the Council of Canadians, these assets include 70 percent of Ontario's newspapers, almost every paper in British Columbia, and all the papers in Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan. ...Black's [management] is usually described as ruthless. ... Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, describes a typical takeover by Black's Hollinger this way (CounterSpin, 8/15/96): "They fire half the staff, they get rid of the environment reporters and the social affairs and the education and health reporters, and they replace them with businesspeople --or they don't replace them at all.... Anyone not singing that very right-wing Newt Gingrich type of... line is soon let go."
The interesting thing, however, is that on Nov. 17, 2003 (just five days later), Black announced he would step down as CEO of U.S.-based newspaper conglomerate Hollinger International. The move followed findings of a special committee that Black and other senior Hollinger executives received $32.15 million in unauthorized payments. That could be why he was being interviewed so much. |