The last press baron

Mark Steyn on Conrad Black's heroic virtues as a publisher — and the small-minded vices of his enemies New Hampshire Question: What is Hollinger? Answer: It's a man called Benny. He was a barber from Haileybury, Ontario, and in 1909 he was way up north

around Porcupine Lake prospecting for gold. He found it: 'Benny was pulling the moss off the rocks a few feet away when suddenly he let a roar out of him and threw his hat to me,' wrote Alex Gillies, his partner — sorry, pardner (I don't want to make them sound like some New Labour couple from Islington). The claim he staked eventually became the richest gold-producing mine in the Western Hemisphere. As is often the way, Benny didn't see much of it: he sold his claims to Noah Timmins the following year for a million dollars, quickly lost all his money and died young. But his gold mine continued to be known as the Hollinger Mine. Noah Timmins's nephew had already decided that the community growing up around the mine would be named Timmins, and once you've got the company town named after you, you can afford to be generous about subsidiary nomenclature.

Years ago, apropos some other topic entirely, I happened to mention to Conrad Black that I'd once spent a brutal winter in Timmins. `Ah,' he replied. `So you're familiar with the Hollinger mine?'

Yes, indeed. I'd been out to take a look

at it, admired the statue of Benny Hollinger, etc. But it wasn't until Conrad brought it up that I'd consciously connected him and Benny: a mine in Timmins had somehow been transformed into the owner of the Daily Telegraph.

And that's Conrad Black's business his

tory in a nutshell. As his various current chastisers would say, follow the money. At one point or another, just about every bluechip corporation in Canada except the Hudson's Bay Company passed through his control and, in every case, he either got rid of them or, as with Hollinger, converted them into a newspaper company. In the late 20th century, not many fellows with an eye on the bottom line would take a big pile of dough from grocery stores, natural gas, farm implements, etc. and sink it into newspapers. Beating swords into ploughshares is one thing, beating your ploughshares into words is another. The Chicago Sun-Times isn't a metaphorical gold mine to the same degree that an actual gold mine is.

But Conrad Black is perhaps the last man on the planet to be romantic about newspapers. Newspapers, note, not media. So Benny Hollinger's name wound up getting affixed to the biggest company on earth devoted entirely to print journalism. And I doubt anybody who winds up with the Telegraph. the Jerusalem Post or the North Bay Nugget when the great Hollinger death-match is over will ever love newspapering as much as Conrad. If the great columnar herd dancing on his grave would pause for a moment in their tedious recycling of the same half-dozen Barbara Amid l wardrobe anecdotes, they ought at least to give him credit for that. Conrad Black is the world's last press baron.

But the question now, as a reader put it to me the other day, is: 'When are you going to join the other formerly drooling suck-ups and start pissing all over the Blacks?' Well,

the thought did occur. Although I did get an invitation to the grand bash unaccountably thrown by Conrad and Barbara for the editor of this magazine, whoever mails them out sent mine by steam-packet via Tristan da Cunha, so I didn't get it till two months late. So I certainly have my grievances. But not enough to matter. Whatever his defects as a majority shareholder, Conrad Black is about the best boss any reasonably semi-talented hack is likely to find. On the radio the other day, someone asked me if I'd be visiting him in jail. Absolutely. If it comes to that, I'd be honoured to smuggle in a cake with a rolled-up copy of the Speccie in the middle so he can have a good laugh at how bad it's got since Richard Desmond acquired it.

But I don't think it will come to that. Obviously I'm not qualified to comment on the various technical matters under investigation at Hollinger. But why let that stop me? So here goes: Somewhere along the way Hollinger split into two entities. the Canadian holding company — Hollinger Inc — and the American operating unit — Hollinger International. Only in the present civil war has it become clear who's got the keys to what. It turns out, for example, that Hollinger International's website, which these days is mainly your onestop shop for up-to-the-minute press releases on their latest suits against Conrad, was hosted by hollinger.com, which it seems is still Conrad's. So on Sunday he unplugged it, sending the furious Hollinger Int. boys scrambling to set up a new website, hollingerinternational.com, on which any day now they'll be announcing their latest suit seeking recovery of the hollinger.com domain name from Conrad. Ever since the minority shareholders got Conrad bounced from Hollinger International, poor Benny Hollinger has been like one of those comicbook covers where the real Superman is locked in combat with some bizarro Superman, and only one can survive.

I know 'minority shareholders' are as fashionable a victim group as gays and Native Americans these days, but if it's really the case that pulling off a coup at an American subsidiary gives you the right to obstruct the majority shareholder of a parent company in another country in which you have no interest, then whatever that's about it's not 'corporate governance' or 'shareholder power', at least not for the shareholders of the parent company. To pursue my victim-group analogy a little, 'corporate governance' is beginning to develop the same lack of proportion as the traditional seasonal grade-school imbroglio where one cranky Wiccan manages to get the annual holiday concert cancelled for the other 99 kids. The present stand-off at Hollinger is some freaky wagthe-dog scenario that, if supported by the courts and the SEC, will, like much about the over-regulated US business scene, only drive companies to seek arrangements elsewhere. As for what Conrad, his lieutenant David Radler and others are supposed to have done, there are certainly some things — like Hollinger's sale of its smaller newspapers to Horizon, a company run by Radler and Black — that do look, on the face of it, somewhat unusual. But the subsequent $200 million lawsuit is a lot of banana oil. It's a nice big round figure, and about as accurate as all that NGO hooey I noted last year about 500 tons of raw sewage getting pumped into Iraq's water every day. The release of various emails in which the great man compares himself to the French nobility adds to the general gaiety of the business pages but is nothing on which you'd want to build a case.

Meanwhile, for the op-ed generalists, to whom all this SEC-type stuff is a bit heavygoing, the easy fallback is the Gatsby routine. Margaret Wente of the Toronto Globe and Mail began her column with a vignette from an unspecified Canadian social event from last year, before The Fall. "The guests were royalty, billionaires and intellectuals from several countries. Some acquaintances of Barbara's from the old days were there, too. When they went up to her and said hello, she looked right through them, as if they were invisible, then turned away to seek out someone more important.'

I've no idea who the acquaintances from 'the old days' were. Perhaps the chief copy-editor of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix is a bit of a crasher. But my own experience is quite the opposite. At a swank Conradian lunch a while back, Barbara chose to sit at a table with me, David Waste11 and John Cruickshank. 'Who?' you're no doubt asking. Precisely. None of us is a household name, even in our own households. Wastell was a Sunday Telegraph reporter and Cruickshank was the executive associate co-editor of the Sun-Times. The nearest thing to a household name on our table — Table 73, if memory serves — was Lord Carrington, and then only if your household's a presidential palace in Buenos Aires and you're planning on invading the Falklands: Lord Carrington hasn't generated 'buzz', as Tina Brown would say, for two decades. If Barbara had wanted to 'seek out someone more important', she'd have been at a table with Don Rumsfeld or Giscard d'Estaing or some of the other bigshots in the room. It's not as if we were terribly interesting. I'm much duller in life than on the page (feel free to replace 'much' with `even'), Waste11's a lugubrious cove, and Cruickshank was pretty subdued after Barbara had spent the first 20 minutes dissecting the various deficiencies in the Sun-Times. So my impression is different from Ms Wente's: I thought Barbara Amid l was like Frank Sinatra at parties, when, instead of gravitating to the A-list movie stars, he'd shoot the breeze with the musicians.

Meanwhile, between the torpid backgrounders about the role of the Ontario Securities Commission and the generalised *attests of the Wentes, hardly anything seems to have been written about the group's newspapers, which is a pity. Whether because of Black. Radler and Dan Colson (as logic would suggest) or because it's pure coincidence (as Tweedy, Browne suggest), Hollinger has somehow managed to improve almost every prominent title that's ever passed its way.

The Telegraphs, says John O'Sullivan (who worked there in Lord Hartwell's day), are 'quite simply the best conservative newspapers in the world'. I agree. The Chicago Sun-Times isn't as lively a tabloid as the British strain, but on Sundays it runs me opposite the Revd Jesse Jackson, which right there is a wider range of columnists than most somnolent American dailies provide in the course of a week. Canada's National Post, launched by Conrad in 1998, was the happiest experience of my journalistic life.

Already that era, when Hollinger owned pretty much everything in sight, is looked back on as a golden age of Canadian newspapers. Before Conrad got control of the old Southam group, the big-city broadsheets from British Columbia to Prince Edward Island had been snoozing for decades: they were smug, mediocre and conformist. I doubt you could find a capital city anywhere in the world that had as dull a newspaper as the pre-1996 Ottawa Citizen. Conrad Black put a long overdue rocket up these lethargic properties and, as usual, the ethics bores at the journalism colleges whined non-stop that this unwarranted interference raised serious questions about freedom of the press in Canada. If memory serves (and I may have fallen asleep while reading their statement of concern), they wanted a Royal Commission that would agree that the best way to have a free press would be for the government to take it over. The Liberal party elevated a woman called Joan Fraser to the Senate for no reason other than that she'd been fired by Conrad as editor of the Montreal Gazette. Though the J-school bores insisted the sky was falling, the period when Hollinger controlled 60 per cent of the Canadian newspaper industry saw, paradoxically, more real competition, a rise in (good) journalists' salaries, radical improvement in newspaper design, and even, in a media culture as complacent as the country's political one, genuine investigative journalism.

Whatever Conrad's sins as a company chairman, they're more than outweighed by his heroic virtues as a publisher. And those of us who've toiled for Hollinger in the Dominions know what comes after. After the company withdrew from Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age, et al lapsed back into a dreary mediocrity quite at odds with the spirit of that magnificent nation. After Hollinger sold the Canadian titles to CanWest, the nervous nellies of the Great White North finally got the big scary centralising downsizer they'd mistaken Conrad for. I hope the Telegraph doesn't have to learn the hard way that Hollinger is about as benign an owner as one can have.

As for Conrad Black, the schadenfreude set are convinced he's wound up like the eponymous Benny Hollinger, losing his money and (career-wise) dying young.

Not a chance. A couple of years back I had occasion to speak to Conrad from Tadoussac on the north shore of the St Lawrence. 'Are you driving on to BaieComeau?' he asked. I said I was and he talked about how the town had been founded by Colonel McCormick, proprietor of the Sun-Times's rival, the Chicago Tribune, who needed a source of newsprint for the company. He recounted in detail the story of the Colonel coming ashore in a canoe, dressed as a Quebecois voyageur. When I saw the statue of the scene the following day, it was exactly as Conrad had portrayed it, yet somehow it lacked the blazing vividness of his description. For Conrad Black, newspapers were a great adventure. Unlike Peter °borne, I don't think he's Napoleon on his way to St Helena; he's Colonel McCormick putting the canoe back into the water and, for the moment, paddling out. It's our loss.

Mark Steyn is Group Senior Contributing Editor of Hollinger, Inc.