Conrad Black is in pugnacious form in one of his first journalistic contributions since being freed from jail.

In a lengthy, very lengthy review of three books about America's three leading newspapers, he takes several swipes at both the authors and the people they write about. As George Brock points out, he takes the opportunity to settle scores.

It begins thus:

These books all dote on the minutiae of the three great American newspapers they describe... the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times. I have known the principal recent players at the head of those three daily print media... There is not one that I disliked, nor any whose intelligence wasn't or isn't evident, but few of them were unusually interesting people to know, have dinner with or talk to.

Then he offers his views on Rupert Murdoch:

Generally not overly forthcoming, rather monosyllabic, an enigma whose banter is nondescript bourgeois filler delivered in a mid-Pacific accent. His idea of humour is pretty coarse, in the Australian manner, without being very original, or very funny. Murdoch has no discernible attachments to anyone or anything except the formidable company he has built... no business associate lasts long... Save for Ronald Reagan, he turned on every politician he ever supported in every country where he has operated; he discarded every loyal lieutenant, two wives and countless friendly acquaintances, as if he were changing his socks. Murdoch is a great white shark, who mumbles and furrows his brow compulsively [with] orange-dyed hair... a man who is airtight in his ruthlessness, unlimited in his ambition, with the iron nerves to have bet the company again and again... is monotonous as a public speaker and unfathomable as a personality... I have long thought that his social philosophy was contained in his cartoon show, The Simpsons: all politicians and public officials are crooks, and the masses are a vast lumpen proletariat of deluded and exploitable blowhards.

But Black was only warming up with his Murdoch character-reading. Here's his take on the late Kay Graham, publisher of the Washington Post:

"a very gracious and unpretentious woman. She never tried to disguise that she was the ugly duckling of the Washington Post's controlling Meyer family... she only became a famous publisher because of the Watergate affair."

And the WashPo's former editor Ben Bradlee:

"a noisy macho man, a live wire at a dinner party... an energetic and fearless producer of news stories, not a memorable intellectual, or even a very thoughtful champion of the newspaper. It was fun to impeach a president; I suppose it was if you didn't consider the consequences or the iniquity of it."

Then he launches into the owners of the NY Times, Sulzbergers past and present. All this is only a warm-up before he turns his fire on the authors and further asides about some of his pet hates, such as Carl Bernstein and, particularly, Bob Woodward and their Watergate source, Mark Felt (aka Deep Throat).

Along the way are anecdotes, none better that his claim that the third Lord Rothermere (Vere Harmsworth) once told him over dinner, after poaching one of his editors:

"They are actors, and we own the theatres. They perform on our stages but don't give a damn about us, and will go elsewhere tomorrow for an extra farthing a week."

Having waded through more than 3,000 words it was a laugh-out-loud moment when I reached this:

"These books... constitute a thousand pages of overblown prose about people who don't deserve the attention, and institutions that are very fallible sacred cows."

And there was still another 1,000 words to go before Black finished raging about the papers' ill-treatment of Richard Nixon, the decline of TV news bulletins, the fallen credibility of old media and "the Kool-Aid-drinking devotees of Washingtonpost.com."

For the record, Black was writing about Sarah Ellison's excellent War At the Wall Street Journal; David Kindred's Morning miracle: inside the Washington Post; and Gay Talese's The Kingdom and the power: behind the scenes at the New York Times.

Source: The National Interest