Media Roundup: Week 3 Ends With Prosecution Ostensibly Weak

As the Conrad Black trial enters the usual three-day weekend hiatus, the overnight media reports are reassessing the prosecution's resurgence that was reported the night before last:

1. The Chicago Tribune's report on the cross-examination of the latest witness, George Creasey.

2. From NewsMax.com, a report that highlights Mr. Creasey's wobbly recall.

3. CBC News has a report that includes one of the questions of Mr. Creasey by Conrad Black's co-chief counsel, Eddie Greenspan, yesterday: "'You rounded up?' Greenspan asked Creasey. 'You made the tax bill bigger? H&R Block would never do that, would they?'" This question refers to Mr. Creasey's calculation of the tax liability for the Bora Bora flight.

4. The International Herald Tribune has a wrapup of the most telling points that Csr. Greenspan made in his cross-examination of Mr. Creasey yesterday.

5. From 570 News, a brief wrap-up and note that Mr. Creasey will be cross-examined again Monday, followed by a videotape of the next witness, Torys LLP lawyer Darren Sukonick.

6. The Ottawa Citizen has a subscribers-only report.

7. The Boston Globe report mentions another document whose existence Mr. Creasey couldn't remember.

8. From the Calgary Sun, a write-up that mentions the frequency of Mr. Creasey's memory lapses, with respect to "meetings and memos that were at least five-years-old[sic]." Also webbed by the Courier.

9. The Australian has a report that relays Mr. Creasey's testimony under direct examination, with a costing of $8.5 million for the annual cost of the plane used by Mr. Black.

10. The write-up from the Chicago Sun-Times, "Witness' math skills questioned," reports on both Csr. Greenspan's cross-examination and Patrick Tuite's earlier memory checks.

11. The Globe and Mail's latest report, by Paul Waldie, starts off with this sentence: "If the prosecutors going after Conrad Black hoped to build their case around the testimony of former Hollinger Inc. executive Fred Creasey, they're in trouble." Like the Australian report, it recounts the testimony elicited by both direct and cross-examination of Mr. Creasey, but it also mentions that the "half" of the cost of the Bora Bora trip that Mr. Black offered to pay was reported as a taxable benefit on his T4 income tax statement for that year.

12. An AP story, posted by the Belleville News-Democrat, has revealed that Judge St. Eve will not allow the names of the trial jurors to be made public. So, the Chicago Tribune is out of luck. [It's also been webbed by Business Week, and has propagated to quite a few media Websites in the last hour or so. The author of it, Mike Robinson, included copious quotes from Judge St. Eve's ruling; those quotes give her reasoning behind the rejection of the Tribune's motion.]


Also: both Tom Bower's biography of Conrad Black and Mr. Black's own biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt have gotten a mention in a column on biographies, by the Times' Ben Macintyre, which discusses how far the genre has come from its servants'-entrance origins.