Media Roundup: The Week That Was; Opinions Mounting

The number of webbed stories on the Conrad Black trial is beginning to slow down. With the background largely explained, and no expected news until Monday, the weekend slowdown could almost be expected.

1. The trial got a brief mention, as number 3 of four items listed in "Five Days: Corporate Dramas Steal The Show From The Fed," in the New York Times. It didn't make the top five list of business articles on nytimes.com, though. Richard Siklos, author of Shades of Black: Conrad Black - His Rise and Fall, wrote the note for the Times.

2. From the Guardian's business section, Andrew Clark fills in more detail on how Conrad Black's "bad attitude" was put into perspective by Edward Genson. It contains the name of the witness that was the corporate finance manager of Hollinger International, now Sun-Times Media Group, at the time of "the American Trucker transaction," Craig Holick, and the name of the company who bought American Trucker, et al.: Primedia. (Intertec Publishing, the company name mentioned in the indictment, was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Primedia; it's now named "Primedia Business Magazines & Media," perhaps from being folded into the latter.)

3. A write-up from the Irish Independent, with the headline "Black seeks to shield jury from eyes of press." Registration required to see it.

4. The National Post has a recap summary of observations on the trial. Notes that Mark Steyn coined the moniker "Chicago Legal" to describe the prosecution team.

5. Romina Maurino has an re-cap in the Toronto Sun.

6. The Globe and Mail's Paul Waldie has an item on Conrad Black's "hosing down" E-mail. It includes a mention of the now-well-known difficulty Eric Sussman had in pronouncing "calumnies" while reading that E-mail to the court. (The singular is "calumny," but its associated verb form is "calumniate.")

7. Slate has another write-up, from Scott Jacobs. It begins by noting that the beginning excitement is being replaced by the "long, hard slog" through the voluminous evidence.

8. A more in-depth report is at the Times Online. It's written by Tom Bower, author of Conrad & Lady Black, who is covering the trial in Chicago. Mr. Bower notes that Mr. Black and David Radler were actually old friends, as well as partners, who have turned on each other. He also presents Gordon Paris as a man of as-yet-unbesmirched probity.


Also, three opinion pieces relating to the Conrad Black trial:

1. The blog "Power Line" recommends Mark Steyn's coverage of the trial, and has an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal Online article that relates, to use the capsule description in the blog, the "ambivalent Canadian perspective" on the trial. Clarice Feldman, from another blog ("American Thinker") similarly praises Mr. Steyn, and recommends his coverage of the trial. [The Steyn post to which the AT entry links is here.] Support for Mr. Steyn's coverage is also on Hugh Hewitt's blog at Townhall.com. An early mention of Mr. Steyn's blogging is over at "Relapsed Catholic."

2. This one is available only to registered users of the Winnipeg Free Press: "Jury should cut Black some slack."

3. Sid Ryan, with his somewhat cynical take on the trial, includes a recounting of the Dominion Stores pension-fund lawsuit. Mr. Ryan is quite glad that his fellow workers are sitting in judgment over Conrad Black.

There's an interesting background to the Dominion controversy. Until Dominion Stores lost the lawsuit, Conrad Black administered its pension fund as a "pay-as-you-go" system: the company was responsible for underfunding, and could claim the proceeds of overfunding. The pay-as-you-go aspect, provided that prior approval was secured for surplus withdrawal from the Ontario Pensions Commission, was part of normal business practice in Canada. The union lawsuit induced a change in the relevant laws. That lawsuit put an end to transfers of surpluses into the corporate till for corporate use, as of 1987, when the change was enacted and implemented. Dominion at the time of the suit was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hollinger Inc, of which Conrad Black was the chairman. The amount that was sued for by the Dominion unions was actually $38 million; they won the giveback in the Ontario Supreme Court in August 1986, athough payment was not issued until 1987. In the Supreme Court decision, the Commission was singled out as the institution at fault. Conrad Black or anyone else in Hollinger or "Domgroup," Dominion Stores' corporate name at the time, wasn't blamed in that decision. (Distilled from Shades of Black: Conrad Black - His Rise and Fall, pp. 102-5.

(Another Siklos-derived factiod: Mr. Black was a young Liberal, as of the mid-1960s, and his friendship with Peter G. White, a known Progressive Conservative, may very well have gotten Mr. White a job with Maurice Sauvé, a Liberal forestry minister under Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson. See Shades of Black: Conrad Black - His Rise and Fall, p. 22.)


Finally: one of those "hard-core" journalists mentioned by Mr. Jacobs, Kevin Baker of the National Post, describes how his interest in the trial turned him on to day-time TV.