It takes a village to rehabilitate a criminal, and I’m afraid we’ve all been failing Conrad Black. His chief enabler is The National Post, for which I have been known to write myself. The Post has given Prisoner #18330-424 a column, thus allowing him to maintain the delusion that he remains a man of position, and to reiterate his belief that he has done nothing wrong. I doubt that many of his readers are persuaded, but, as any cognitive therapist will tell you, constantly repeating distorted thoughts to oneself is a sure recipe for lunacy.

In his latest missive from Coleman correctional facility, Prisoner #18330-424 begins with a few self-deprecating remarks about his circumstance, which suggests there is hope for him yet. At least I think he does; I had supposed for awhile that writing for a newspaper was forcing concision and lucidity upon his prose, in a way that his seigneurial contributions to old Saturday Night magazine never did, but now I’m not so sure. “I am also prepared to commit the moral authority gained by my present residential perspective in an authentic laboratory of the American Dream,” he writes, “both of the Jeffersonian call to the pursuit of happiness, and of the constitutional right to the blessings of liberty.” Wait, is he actually saying that being a victim of prosecutors, judges, juries, et al. confers upon him greater moral authority? Who knows?

Regardless, he later uses the article to offer some stock tips: “I put in a buy order last week for some shares in Bank of America, Brookfield, General Electric and News Corporation — whose chairman, my dear friend Rupert Murdoch, demonstrated” oh never mind. It’s unclear how Mr. Black, in using the Post to promote these stocks, is different from fraudsters who use the internet to inflate the worth of penny stocks. This raises the possibility that, far from being rehabilitated, the prisoner is continuing to conduct criminal activities from his 9×8 foot living space.

He is not aided in his recovery by the “large number of readers and followers of these events” from whom he claims to receive regular “encouragement.” I’d discount his claim, except that many of these supporters are present in the comments section following his column. Some share his prose style — “A corrupt judicial system has as its first line of defence the suppression of all due process of an illuminatory and reform nature” — some his difficulty with the proper use of a semi-colon: “Wonderful to read Lord Blacks [sic] commentary; from history to today’s difficulties.” All are doing him a disservice. They are joined by such prominent co-dependents as Mark Steyn and Barbara Amiel, who you’d think would have an interest in hastening the prisoner’s return to society.

Will Baron Black of Coleman eventually face a parole board? (I confess to being less knowledgeable about the prison system than he.) If so, someone should remind him that a show of remorse and acknowledgment of misdoing is usually a necessary condition of early release. Meantime, I beg my sometime bosses at the Post to help this man by taking his column away. Perhaps, if you really feel obliged to employ him, because he started the paper or whatever, he could review new DVD releases or live blog episodes of “Lost.” Anything to end his filibustering for the defence. And if you’ve really become attached to this Dispatches from the Big House idea (it does have a certain frisson to it — kind of like having Jean Genet write for you), well, Phil Spector is now available. He knows a lot about music. And he’s so bat-shit crazy, he’ll probably never be rehabilitated.

We’re a bit sniffy about top 10 lists at backofthebook.ca, for the reasons outlined here, but we’re very big on checking our web stats. Or at least I am, in my capacity as publisher/editor/chief lackey. Now you may suppose web stats — that is, the numbers showing how many visitors a site has, how many pages they view, etc. — are about as exciting as Stephen Harper’s hair. And you would be right. However, hidden amongst them is the search term the visitor used that happened to bring him to our little roost on the internet (if he didn’t come here directly). And those can be very, very . . . well . . . odd.

Sometimes, of course, they simply represent what’s in the air at that moment — for example, this search from last year:

“barbara amiel plastic surgery”

Frankly, looking at her, we wouldn’t mind knowing who her doctor is ourselves. Sometimes they are enigmatic:

“naked dream men”

Is the searcher looking for naked men who are dreamy? Did he or she have a dream about naked men and now wants to know what it means? And how disappointed were they when they ended up here?

Sometimes they are plaintive:

“i am pregnant and my husband is not sure how we are going to afford it”

“i’m not sure where my marriage is going”

Or desperate:

“someone save me”

I know the feeling. Others seem to evince an unusual, nay unhealthy interest in yours truly:

“moher scolding child”

Excuse me?

Or:

“sexy moher movies”

Now that’s more like it. I fear, however, that “moher” is just a misspelling of “mother”. Nevertheless, I’ll be glad to send you some sexy moher movies for just $19.95 plus S&H.;

And so it is with great lack of discretion and total betrayal of our vistors’ misplaced trust that we share our “Top 10 Web Searches of 2008.” All real, all taken directly from our web logs, and all proving that people have no idea, when they type something into google, that someone somewhere might actually end up reading it.

#10: “stephan dion dumbass”

#9: “belinda stronach dirty slut”

#8: “prick jack layton”
(It’s nice to see we attract a broad range of frenzied ideologues.)

#7: “where to get a blow job calgary”

#6: “Mrs. Trudeau without panties”
(We like that decorous “Mrs.” part.)

#5: A collective entry. We like to think of this as the “Jian Ghomeshi Suite”.
“is jian ghomeshi gay”
“jian ghomeshi gay”
“is jian ghomeshi married”
“jiam ghomeshi married”
“jian ghomeshi wife”
“jian ghomeshi sex”

#4 (We have no idea what to make of this one): “prime minister child threw grain at him stop kick butt brian mulroney”

#3: “did quebec ever move”

#2: “CANADIANS STOP WHINING ABOUT WHAT THE AMERICANS HAVE”

And the number 1 top web search of 2008:

“game show human tetris fat woman holy crap”

Monday’s New York Times contained an article with the hed Trial of Black Raises Conflict Issue, about the game of Twister that Maclean’s has gotten itself into trying to cover the proceedings. It noted that Lady Black is the magazine’s star columnist, and both main trial correspondent Mark Steyn and publisher and editor-in-chief Kenneth Whyte are former employees of Black’s (not to mention editor Mark Stevenson, managing editors Dianne de Fenoyl and Dianna Symonds, and, for all I know, members of the janitorial staff). And Whyte, of course, just finished up a stint as a witness for the defence, filling in the glamour quotient as best he could, given that Donald Trump wasn’t called to testify after all.

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I, too, have been an employee of Black’s, when I worked as an editor for Saturday Night for two stints in the late ’90s. I also freelanced for both SN and The National Post during Black and Whyte’s tenures there. (I still do so for the latter.) The difference between me and those others is this: they got paid way more, and I live on a small island off the coast of BC and so don’t have to worry about running into any of these people at a cocktail party.

Whyte told the Times, “Mr. Steyn has informed me that he plans to prove his journalistic integrity by treating me twice as harshly as other witnesses.” I’m sure we can enjoy a good chortle right along with the two of them. But the best that Steyn has been able to come up with in the way of criticism of Whyte has been to assay that “in Thursday’s testimony Ken was a bit too rueful and self-deprecating and that, in response to Ms Ruder’s dimestore dominatrix style of cross-examination, something a bit more combative might be more called for.” In other words, Whyte was just too nice a guy, and why did that mean Ms. Ruder have to pick on him? And this was after the Times had raised the issue of their chumhood.

Of course, the skein of mutually supportive relationships identified in the Times is just standard practice for the clusterfuck known as the Toronto media. Or, as Kelly McBride, a “journalism ethics specialist” at the Poynter Institute, helpfully explained it away: “A lot of journalists marry other journalists, are children of other journalists, and it looks very suspicious to outsiders.” Don’t it just. McBride goes on to suggest that, in order to judge the impartiality of a journalist who’s writing about friends and associates you should look at what’s on the page. But that’s only one measure of impartiality. The other is what isn’t on the page.

For example, how is it that neither Steyn nor anyone else, as far as I can see, has asked what Ken Whyte was doing taking $100,000 from Conrad Black in 2003? This was almost two years after Black had completely divested himself of his ownership of the Post, but before Whyte had been fired as editor by its new owners, CanWest Global. In his testimony, Whyte first described this as a “performance bonus” (paid out 18 months late?), then later acknowledged that it was also paid because Black wanted to maintain their relationship. (Hmm, I wonder if that would work with my wife: “Wanna maintain our relationship, honey? It’s gonna cost ya.”) Whatever; let’s give Black the benefit of the doubt and say that he just felt bad about selling the Post and leaving Whyte to twist in the wind. $100,000 worth of bad. But what was Whyte, as editor of the Post, doing accepting any money, much less a hundred grand, from a highly newsworthy and controversial public figure whom his paper would almost certainly be covering? Is that the way he runs Maclean’s?

I don’t say that either Whyte or Black had anything but the purest, most filial of intentions in making the deal. I just say that it was a highly dumb move on Whyte’s part. Steyn writes, vis-a-vis the New York Times story, that “all this media navel-gazing about ‘conflicts of interest’ ignores the obvious: as I’ve said before, I have no financial interest in defending Conrad and nor does Ken. He signed our paycheques, but that was long ago now.” Well, that $100,000 wasn’t no paycheque. And exactly when does the statute of limitations on financial interests run out?

Now that the Conrad Black trial has entered its Radlerian phase, with Black’s former capo taking the stand against him, it’s time once again to blog the poor bloggers (and columnists) consigned to Chicago’s federal courthouse.

Question: what is Mark Steyn without his trademark wit? Answer: the rather dull fellow we find currently blogging the trial for Maclean’s. Steyn’s anger at what he regards as the unjust treatment of his former boss guides his coverage — impartiality, apparently, is for wanks — and nothing is more certain to make you unfunny than righteous indignation. Alas, without the yuks, Steyn is just another information worker — and not a very reliable one at that.

His composure deserted him completely on Monday, as, along with the rest of the drama-starved courtroom live-ins, he salivated at the prospect of Radler’s arrival. “The day of the rat is here,” he wrote. “Renowned cheapskate and germaphobe David Radler, Conrad Black’s right-hand man turned government stool pigeon, is scheduled to begin testifying today.” That’s either four or five epithets, depending on whether you regard “right-hand man” as derisory. Perhaps just “rat cheapskate germaphobe” would have been enough.

But the greater problem with Steyn’s team loyalty is that it’s forcing him into some bizarre moral postures. Lately he’s taken to arguing this: the Hollinger directors signed off on documents referring to the non-compete payments that are at the heart of the prosecution’s case. Whether they knew they were doing so (they say they did not) is irrelevant; according to Steyn, that makes the payments all right. But, of course, it does no such thing — particularly in the case of the payment made by Horizon Publications, which Black and Radler partially owned. Even the rat cheapskate germaphobe could figure that one out. “Did you have any intention of competing?” prosecutor Eric Sussman asked Radler.

“No,” he answered.

Why?

“Because it would be like competing against one’s self.”

Meantime, over at Toronto Life, Douglas Bell continues to offer the liveliest coverage, thanks in no small part to those leaving comments on his blog. In response to Barbara Amiel’s latest Maclean’s column, in which she pulls an Elizabeth May and makes some inappropriate second world war allusions, one reader writes: “This self-righteous peaen to botox, collagen, cosmetic surgery, etc. is trying to compare her current predicament to the Holocaust???” Never mind that “paean” is misspelled; that’s personal invective worthy of Mark Steyn!

Another visitor notes that “Black’s claim that he left Radler to run the western Canadian and US papers never was very credible. For example, he weighed in publicly in labour disputes at their Calgary paper, at one point engaging in his trademark style of mudslinging when he described a priest, who supported the labourers, as a jerked up little twit, or some such charming Black epithet . . . . he must be hoping the prosecution doesn’t happen on the numerous accounts of his handling of that labour dispute.” One of which, come to think of it, you’ll find right here in backofthebook.ca.

In The Independent, Dominic Lawson quotes this telling passage from Black’s new biography of Richard Nixon “The American prosecutorial system encourages suborned or intimidated perjury, or at least spontaneous clarity of recollection . . . plea bargains are negotiated by threat and financial strangulation and reduction of penalties, as lower echelons roll over in sequence blaming higher-ups.” Adds Lawson: “For Richard Milhous Nixon, read Conrad Moffat Black.”

Many bloggers remarked on how hale and relaxed Radler appeared on the stand. “If they win their case, federal prosecutors might want to consider using Radler in a promotional video about the incentives to being a cooperating witness,” wrote Mark Brown in the Chicago Sun-Times. To Steyn, of course, this was evidence of self-satisfaction.
But it may just be that a little confession remains good for the soul.

And everybody seemed to buy Radler’s claim that he doesn’t know how to use e-mail. But as those of us who do use e-mail know, one should never commit to the cybersphere anything one wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper the next day. It seems to me just as likely that Radler — engaged in various shady transactions as he was — realized that the phone, not Microsoft Outlook, was his friend.

That lousy rat cheapskate germaphobe.

And now, to blog the bloggers and columnists on the Conrad Black Trial . . .

Even as Christie Blatchford engaged in some generous genital-licking of Mark Steyn as part of her coverage, referring to him as “a very funny columnist” (which is often true), she was also showing him how to do the job. Steyn, who was a favoured columnist at both The National Post and The Daily Telegraph when they were owned by Black, has been covering the trial in his Maclean’s blog with the alert air of a puppy who senses that his master might be in some sort of trouble. Blatchford is known to be just as much a Black patriot, but she knows better than to appear so.

And so while Steyn works the ad tanimens (“I sat behind [prosecution witness] Paris as he waited to take the stand and, to judge from the back of his neck, he’s been working on his tan”), Blatchford presents more equable, if tenuous, arguments supporting Black’s justifications: “After all, what good would a non-compete agreement be with a newspaper company if the owners — with, in Lord Black’s case, his larger-than-life personality and considerable experience — can just form a new company and open up shop the next day?”

Now, given that in once instance Lord Black sold American Trucker magazine and then agreed not to compete with it, this strikes me as tenuous indeed; the notion that he might turn around and start up a rival American Trucker magazine from his home on the Bridle Path Estates in Toronto seems pretty much risible. However, Blatchford is at least not stooping to examining the prosecution witnesses’ tanlines to determine their worthiness.

Elsewhere, Patrick Gossage (who I believe had something to do with the federal Liberals a long time ago, but I can’t be bothered to google it) takes the position in Toronto Life that the presence of Lady Black-Amiel in the courtroom is a liability, given the “irreversible perception of Barbara” as a, oh, whatever. The fact that the words “Barbara” and “Amiel” are as meaningless to Chicago jurors as “Peter” and “Mansbridge” is lost on Mr. Gossage.

Meanwhile, the best (if not the most aggrieved [Steyn] or most entertaining [Douglas Bell in Toronto Life]) blogger on the Black trial is Michael Miner in the Chicago Reader who writes: “Canadian reporters in Chicago should take note: Conrad Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, is nothing we haven’t seen before. Black’s blunder was to take his company public, putting his vast vanity and indulgences on a short leash held by stockholders. Sam Zell is buying the Tribune Company to take it private, where goofy media moguls can do what they please.”

Now that the merry pranksters at Frank magazine have been outed as the satirists behind the http://www.supportlordblack.com hoax, it behooves us to ask who does support Conrad Black, and why? The March 12th issue of Maclean’s magazine offers an answer: Mark Steyn, a right-wing columnist described by Peter Preston of the London Observer as an “American-based neo-con ranter.”

Steyn, whose by-line also appears regularly in such conservative publications as the Western Standard and the National Review, writes in Maclean’s that Lord Black and his wife, the columnist Barbara Amiel, have been “good for readers and good for newspapers.” He doesn’t elaborate, but we presume he is referring to the fact that Black gave Canada The National Post — a national daily to compete with The Globe and Mail — and that he ran a media company, Hollinger Inc., which owned most of the country’s other major dailies. Were these papers good for readers when Black was at the helm? Sometimes. Black believed in spending money on journalism, and newspapers often put out a better product when the editorial budget is increased.

But was Black good for the newspapers? More specifically, did he provide good leadership for the people who worked at the newspapers? Let me speak from experience here. I worked as a staff writer at the Calgary Herald for 25 years. For more than 20 of those years, I couldn’t have asked for a better job. We had salaries and benefits comparable to those in big newsrooms across the country. We had bosses who encouraged us to do quality writing and photography and respect the intelligence of our readers. My job as a features writer and columnist took me across Canada and beyond in search of good stories. It was one of the best gigs I ever had.

Our winter of discontent began in 1996, a few months before Hollinger assumed a controlling interest in Southam, the company that owned the Herald. With a workaholic publisher in charge, the newsroom turned into a white-collar sweatshop. Reporters were ordered to produce more and more copy, which was then arbitrarily rewritten by newsroom managers to conform to the publisher’s expectations. Dignity went out the window along with respect. We often opened our newspapers in the morning to find our stories altered beyond recognition. “Drive-by editing,” we called it. Many of these editorial changes, done without consultation with the reporters, resulted in errors, and readers demanding printed corrections, apologies, and retractions.

In October 1998, editorial staffers voted to join the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union (CEP). For the first time in 115 years, the Herald newsroom was certified. But two years of Hollinger ownership had failed to fix the problems caused by the previous management. In fact, things had gotten worse. Aside from the drive-by editing, there had been indiscriminate firings. Senior writers were dismissed for the flimsiest of reasons. We needed protection from the madness. We became CEP Local 115A. We spent a year trying unsuccessfully to negotiate a first contract. Then the company locked us out. We were on the picket line for eight months.

In March 2000, Black came to Calgary to attend a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce shareholders’ meeting. Some of the locked-out workers confronted him in the lobby of the Westin Hotel. He told us the Herald had improved as a paper since the start of the lock-out. The paper’s dwindling circulation said otherwise. Union leader Andy Marshall asked Black why he was insulting his once-valued employees. “We’re not,” responded Black. “We’re amputating gangrenous limbs.”

The lock-out ended on June 30th, 2000 with the union being decertified and most of the 93 workers still on the picket line taking buyouts. I was one of those who took the money. My job as a columnist had been eliminated and many of my friends were looking for employment elsewhere, including a number of national-award winners who had once combined to make the Herald one of the best dailies in Western Canada. With them gone, I could see no reason for going back into the building.

So, was Conrad Black good for the Calgary Herald? When union leader Marshall said in March, 2000 that the Herald needed us back in the building to restore its status as a quality paper, Black replied: “We’ve got one. And it’s getting better all the time.” Seven years later, I still beg to differ.

Brian Brennan is a Calgary author and journalist. His latest title is How the West Was Written: The Life & Times of James H. Gray.