

Conrad Black writes long, and it’s going to take me a while to read his latest book, A Matter of Principle. But it’s enthralling stuff, so I thought I’d write about it as I read it, if that’s OK with you. These are my impressions of the first third of it.

There’s a passage on the 19th page of Conrad Black’s new book that may hold a very simple key to the distance between Lord Crossharbour and the sort of people who don’t write critically acclaimed biographies of world historical figures while successfully running international corporations and maintaining friendships with all the people he’s ever admired who are still alive, a distance he relishes and many of the rest of us disdain, a distance that may, itself, be a large part of the answer to his current difficulties.

“Personally, Murdoch is an enigma. My best guess is that culturally he is an Archie Bunker who enjoys locker room scatological humour and detests effete liberalism. I have long thought that his hugely successful animated cartoon television program, The Simpsons, is the expression of his societal views: the people are idiots and their leaders are crooks.”

He’s writing here about Murdoch, with whom he’s had professional and personal dealings, whom he calls the greatest media mogul of all time, but whom he also thinks is a rogue, too much of an outsider, who seems not only to play by his own rules, but to break them whenever its seems convenient. Black’s written about Murdoch before, and it’s always fascinating reading.

I quite like the image of Black watching All in the Family, though he seems not to have done so especially carefully, or he’d know how appalled Archie was at scatological humour. It’s also probably not insignificant that his analysis of The Simpsons focuses on the majority of its characters’ lack of obvious intelligence rather than their mostly inevitable decency.

The key, however, is that possessive pronoun nestled in the middle of the paragraph. Black describes The Simpsons as belonging to Murdoch.

Now, I am not by any means what Black would call a commercial expert, but I may know enough to see that Black has a point here. Fox Television owns the copyright to The Simpsons, News Corporation owns Fox Television and Rupert Murdoch controls News Corporation and as a result, it’s fair for Black to refer to the show as Murdoch’s.

It’s also fair to say that most of the rest of us would call it Matt Groening’s show that runs on Murdoch’s network.

Though Black is known to most of us–well, to me anyway–as a media baron, he shows himself in this often very dense and enormously detailed book as a businessman first, a newspaper owner second. Even though his first business venture was a newspaper, the Eastern Townships Advertiser, he speaks here only of how much he paid for his half share of it ($500) and later, about how he ultimately turned that original $500 investment into hundreds of millions.

He spend a lot of time talking about how he structured deals, how he restructured his family company, and how he and David Radler bought, reorganized and sold various newspapers at great profit.

And throughout, he points out that he was the controlling shareholder in the complicated corporate structure that owned these papers, that they were his, and the staffs he hired ran them for him. “The lot of the proprietor,” he writes, “especially if he has an international business to run, is not easy if he aspires to uphold a line against the guerilla activities of his editors.”

There is a not entirely unjustified tendency among the enduringly successful to assume that they are successful for a reason. Even Einstein, who famously disavowed the notion that he was a genius, ascribed his own success to the ability to work very hard. In Black’s case, the fact of ownership is a badge of achievement. Like Donald Trump, Bill Gates and Linus Larrabee, he took a modest family fortune and made it into something much bigger. The fact that he was able to buy the Telegraph and start up the National Post was a big part of his qualification for doing so. And even when he allows that, at least in the modern climate, newspapers cannot be just the mouthpieces for their owners, he makes it fairly clear that they might be better if, at least in his case, they were. “I was always wary,” he says, speaking of the Telegraph, “there as in the National Post and elsewhere, of imposing my will too strongly on my editors other than for the most overwhelmingly important issues. I asserted my views forcefully but have met the full range of editorial resistance tactics. Raising children is a good formation for dealing with editors and journalists.”

Once again, Black’s attitude towards the people who populate his creations is not unusual. Bernard Shaw thought of actors as chess pieces to be moved around the stage, and Robert Bresson refused even to call his actors actors, preferring the term “model.” But you can see how actors might not appreciate the attitude. It just so happens that the people Black sees of this way are the people who did more than anyone else to give us our opinion of the man.

Black’s world is different from most of ours, certainly in scale, but also in practice. In the world of the employed, for instance, doing favours for people professionally–giving someone a job, say, because they did something nice for you–is mostly not on. At the very least, if you do it, you have to upholster your true motivation with more practical justifications. But Black lives in a world where one dine with the worthiest and most able of people, people who feel completely justified, and perhaps are completely justified, in rewarding each other, and at least Black makes no bones about it. Of Allan Gotlieb, for instance, former Canadian ambassador to the US and husband of the often insufferably out of tune columnist Sondra, he writes, “When he left government service, I gave him the sinecure of being publisher of Saturday Night and persuaded Sotheby’s to engage him as their well-paid Canadian chairman.”

From down here, that might look like an old boys club ensuring that once you’ve reached a certain level (or, more cynically, been born properly), you can expect to be taken care of, a personal incarnation of the too-big-to-fail school of financial support. Black makes it clear, though, that from up there, it’s just society’s most able people getting their just deserts.

You see that dedication to a mostly money-based meritocracy winding through and running underneath so much of what Black writes here that, after a hundred pages or so, you start to develop a much better understanding of the man. He is a supremely capable man who has, in his own eyes, done quite a bit taking care of other capable men and women in a system that propels the able upwards, to the Bridle Path and Mayfair and further, to Davos and Bilderburg, and maintains the less so at more middling and inferior positions. It’s a system that works, or did work until it spat him out. He spends a lot of time in this book calling out the people who stopped returning his calls, found themselves unable to do him favours when he needed them, or simply were not vocally supportive when he feels their support would have helped either his case or his spirit or, perhaps most important of all, his sense that the system was still operational.

This is a book born of shock, disappointment and redoubled resolve, written by a man who now knows he can no longer rely on the support of his equals, a man who, if he manages to get back on his feet, may look a lot more like Rupert Murdoch next time around.

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Bert Archer is Toronto Standard’s Media Critic.