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The greatest Canadian circulation war occurred in the 1950s and 1960s in Toronto, between the Toronto Star and the Toronto Telegram. While The Globe and Mail played third fiddle, the Star and Telegram skirmished through many decades, from deadline to deadline and story to story.

It was a Political war with a capital P between the relentlessly Liberal/left/socialist Star and the steadfastly Conservative, Royalist and right-wing Telegram. Owners called one another names, but it was all part of the sport. The proprietor of the Telegram in the early 1950s, a wealthy deal-maker named George McCullagh, told his employees his objective was to go after the Star and “knock that shitrag right off its pedestal.”

In his lively book on the mid-century Star/Telegram era, Hello Sweetheart… Get Me Rewrite: Remembering the Great Newspaper Wars, veteran newspaper writer Val Sears, who died in January at 88, reports on McCullagh’s roughhouse observation on the physical appearance of the Star’s then-president, H.C. Hindmarsh. In an interview with Time magazine, McCullagh said, “That fellow Hindmarsh is so ugly that if he ever bit himself he’d get hydrophobia.”

Absurd and crude, maybe, but mild compared with the latest ugly language in the current newspaper war between the Toronto Star and Postmedia Network, which owns a chain of newspapers across Canada, including the National Post. In what appears to be a concerted effort to malign and destroy the reputation of its competitor, the Toronto Star and John Honderich, chairman of its corporate owner, Torstar, recently launched a series of personal and corporate attacks on Postmedia’s executives and corporate behaviour.