Conrad Black ‘obit’ shames the profession
Canadaland smear job was cruel and puerile
Isneaked away this week for a few days of holiday, but occasionally checked in on the news and Twitter.
It was there I read a vicious piece about Conrad Black, the founder and former publisher of the National Post and thus my former boss. He is now a colleague, writing Saturdays for the paper.
The problem is, it wasn’t a story or a column; it was a pretend obituary, fake news in the current lexicon, pub- lished on the Canadaland website and written by one Robert Jago, under the cover that, as the preamble to the piece says, “Newspapers regularly pre- draft obituaries for well-known figures.”
That’s true, though actually, we don’t “pre- draft” obituaries or anything else. Daily journalists in particular haven’t the time to do drafts of stories, let alone pre- drafts, whatever they might be.
Writers write what used to be called “z” copy, the long background of a famous person’s life that can be quickly topped off with a few paragraphs detailing the date, time, place and cause of the person’s death.
What newspapers never do, except rarely and only by accident, is publish an obituary — least of all, one like this, so petty and unfunny — when the subject, even one as infuriating as some Canadians find Black, is still very much alive.
That was the whole point of Canadaland doing this: Aren’t they daring? Not for Canadaland the conventions of what Jago and others call “the legacy media.”
As the preamble noted, the intent was “to give Lord Black a glimpse of what every First Nations writer and activist can guarantee will dominate the coverage of his passing and form his enduring legacy.”
I wa s hoping Black wouldn’t see the piece, and it was only when he tweeted in reply, this single tweet more clever than anything Jago wrote, that I realized he had.
I have but one reservation — that writing anything about this gives air to Jago, an Indigenous activist and freelance writer who lives in Montreal, and Canadaland itself.
I once was a supporter of Canadaland. Its slogan is “We keep the media accountable” and I believe in that. I also believe in paying for what I read, what I listen to, and what I watch.
I signed up with Patreon and for a year or so, paid a modest fee ( maybe $ 20? I’m not sure now) every month to support it.
I only stopped my subscription a few months ago.
What I read on the site was often mean- spirited. The work sometimes seemed careless. Canadaland’s own political agenda was as least as strong and intrusive as at any legacy paper, and its preoccupations struck me as small, rather like those of universities — social justice, racially balanced newsrooms, who earns how much and how much more than X or Y, etc. So I quit it.
Black has his acolytes and detractors, equally rabid probably, and is well able to defend himself.
For the record, I’m neither.
When I worked for him, he scared the hell out of me because I knew he was far smarter than I am ( and yes, that’s a vast group, but Black is genuinely erudite), and was intimidated by him. But I always liked him ( he’s very funny) and was always proud to work for him, as proud as I was decades earlier to work for Doug Creighton, the founding publisher of the Toronto Sun. These men started from scratch the only two new major daily newspapers in this country in my lifetime, and that is a hell of an accomplishment. And in Black’s case, it was wonderful to work for a man who loved language and words and knew how to use them.
Jago is critical of Black for being anti-Indigenous in his writing, and of some of his facts. I don’t know enough about original Indigenous culture to know if he’s on the mark or not about the latter, but certainly, Black’s record — among his books, critically acclaimed biographies of Maurice Duplessis, Richard Nixon and Franklin Delano Roosevelt — suggest certainly that while he surely has big opinions, he’s a careful researcher.
He would, in any reasonable remembrance, be given credit for this.
Jago wrote in his faux obituary: “…given the omertà that holds sway within Canada’s media, Black was exempted from the usual lifelong opprobrium reserved for ex-cons and was instead most often portrayed as an Icarian figure…” and said that even “a fawning press” can’t divorce the pic- ture of him in his prime, in “a double- breasted suit,” from the picture of him as an inmate of a Florida prison, presenting his posterior for the mandatory search.
( Thus Black’s tweet: “I demand a full retraction of this libellous bilge … I wouldn’t be caught dead in a doublebreasted suit.”)
While in prison — he served almost 42 months for fraud and obstruction of justice related to his running of his former company, Hollinger Inc. — he wrote a memoir of his prosecution, trial, various and mostly successful appeals (two of three convictions for fraud were set aside) and incarceration.
How many cons could swing that, while also, by the by, tutoring other inmates in English and U. S. history and becoming an advocate for prison reform?
All of which is to say, Jago is wrong about how Black likely will be remembered, even, I suspect, among Indigenous Canadians, who are not so homogeneous a group that one fellow can appoint himself to speak for them all.
Neither in my experience are most of them so coarse as to say, even of someone who really was dead, “as putrefaction sets in on the corpse…”
(Full disclosure, Jago also does a drive- by smear of me and Rex Murphy in that same sentence, but we are merely collateral damage.)
It was, in short, a cruel and juvenile piece that no newspaper would ever publish, let alone with such relish. It shames the profession.