Asked for his thoughts about the fact the mayor had lied to him, Conrad Black borrowed the words of Chief Bill Blair.

“To quote the chief of police, ‘I am disappointed,’” Black wrote in an email. “I hope that this is the beginning of a straighter course of conduct for him.”

Black, who has personally fielded considerable criticism for not challenging Ford during their 35-minute interview, remains unapologetic for his role in the controversy.

“I unearthed what has proved to be a good story. Despite his problems with the facts, the mayor can finish his term if he stays sober and clean and does his job, and that has been my concern. On election day, the voters will decide,” Black wrote.

On Wednesday night, Mayor Rob Ford released a two-page retraction and apology to Star reporter Daniel Dale. At issue were comments Ford made on Black’s new current affairs show, The Zoomer.

Black had asked Ford to recount the most “offensive” event he’d had to deal with in terms of the media.

Ford replied: “The worst one was Daniel Dale in my backyard taking pictures. I have little kids. When a guy’s taking pictures of little kids, I don’t want to say the word, but you start thinking, you know, what’s this guy all about?”

Many inferred that “the word” Ford refused to say was: pedophile. Black told the Star in an earlier email that he thought the mayor was calling Dale a “peeping Tom.”

During the segment, both Ford and Black criticized Chief Blair for saying he was “disappointed” after viewing the so-called crack video. Black said he felt it was inappropriate for the chief to make a personal judgment. Ford agreed and then accused Blair of going after him as retribution for proposed budget cuts.

The mayor also erroneously told Black that Dale had been standing on “cinderblocks” peering over his fence that evening in May 2012.

In fact, Dale was never in the backyard, never taking photos of the mayor’s children, never standing on cinderblocks and never near the mayor’s fence. Dale was near Ford’s home to survey a piece of public parkland that the mayor had wanted to purchase for personal use.

The interview aired twice, once on Monday December 9 at 9 p.m. and again at midnight. The next day, Ford was defiant, proclaiming he stood “by every word.” But after Dale served Ford with a libel notice, the mayor went silent.

On Tuesday, Ford issued a half-hearted apology for suggesting Dale was a pedophile, but he refused to admit that all of the other statements he had made about Dale were untrue. That changed on Wednesday, with Ford’s letter.

“I apologize to Mr. Dale for the inaccurate manner in which I described the incident of May 2012,” Ford wrote. “I should not have said what I did and I wholly retract my statements and apologize to Mr. Dale without reservation for what I said.”

Dale now says he will not proceed with the lawsuit.

ZoomerMedia, which twice aired the interview and was also served with a libel notice, released a terse comment in the wake of Ford’s retraction: “We are pleased to see that Mayor Ford has responded to the libel allegations by Mr. Dale by offering a full apology and retraction of his comments. We have always believed that this was primarily a matter between Mr. Dale and Mr. Ford. However, we sincerely regret the part ZoomerMedia played in broadcasting the offending words spoken by Mr. Ford, and apologize for that. We can confirm that those words will never again be broadcast on any of our television outlets or websites."

Black himself took considerable heat for the segment. Most notably, CBC’s Carol Off went after him on As It Happens two days after the interview aired. She pressed Black — someone who has launched numerous libel and slander lawsuits — on why he let Ford say what he did.

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“It’s not my duty to debate with the mayor, I was asking questions and he was giving the answers,” Black said. “At that particular place, Zoomer, I have a function. I do the function. I’m paid to do the function. I’m not paid to edit it.”

Black also told Off: “If the mayor deliberately misled the viewers and did not tell me the truth, lied in fact, I would resent that very much and I’ll comment on it. But I had no reason to believe that’s the case.”

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