There is a telling scene toward the end of Richard Siklos’s authoritative biography of Conrad Black, Shades of Black: Conrad Black—His Rise and Fall, in which the former media mogul rails against his almost certain fate. It is the autumn of 2003. Black has just been ousted as chief executive officer of Hollinger International, the company through which he controlled his media empire. Dogged by a determined media mob clamouring for explanations of the alleged financial improprieties at Hollinger, Black continues to make public appearances to promote his new biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When he is cornered at a book signing at a college in New York City, he turns on his questioners and urges them to contemplate the possibility that he may, in fact, be innocent. “I am being pilloried as a scoundrel,” he says, in what Siklos describes as a woebegone tone, “and I am not a scoundrel.”
It was a poor choice of words, conjuring up the image of former U.S...
Madelaine Drohan is Canada correspondent for The Economist and author of Does Serious Journalism Have a Future in Canada?, a report written when she was a 2015 Prime Ministers of Canada fellow at the Public Policy Forum.
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