On Aug. 11, 2002, two years after his $3.5-billion purchase of 129 newspapers and magazines from Conrad Black made him the paramount media baron in Canada, Israel Harold Asper—known as Izzy to one and all—was piped aboard a ship on the Lake of the Woods. After a string of formalities, Asper became Lord of the Manor of Polington in the parish of Charminster in the County of Dorset. In Asper’s sardonic mind, according to Peter C. Newman’s biography Izzy (HarperCollins), the title—a real one, bought in Britain as a gift by his son Leonard—put him on an equal footing with Black, more formally Baron Black of Crossharbour. The newspaper deal was a high point in the careers of both men: three years later Asper was dead, and by 2007 Black was a convicted felon. Izzy’s initial euphoria over his purchase soon gave way to bitter fighting, with Black—still his equal partner in owning the National Post—and with his new employees. At one point the soon-to-be Lord Polington even challenged Lord Black to a duel. Excerpts from Izzy:
When Israel Harold Asper, armed with an agenda cast in Canadian Shield granite, stormed the smug ramparts of Southam-nurtured editorial departments, he set off a revolution. The journalists thought of themselves as crusading reformers, taunting a Winnipeg Rottweiler who was rehearsing to be Canada’s Rush Limbaugh. None of the comparisons rang true. The newshounds were no Noam Chomsky revolutionaries, threatening the established order. Rush had nothing to do with it, and Asper was no Rottweiler. On the contrary, he was the only Canadian investor willing to risk his fortune in an industry that sought to turn profits from the Dickensian technique of selling impressions made on processed wood pulp.
Izzy’s purchase of Black’s newspapers set off a confrontation of rare intensity, made so hurtful because everyone involved had good reasons to assume they were doing the right thing—that they were merely being true to themselves, and what could be wrong with that? The journalists were defending their mandate as front-line gladiators, guarding the freedom of expression that defines their profession; the Aspers were exercising proprietary rights over papers that had cost them half their company’s market value. The mix was explosive, like a cargo of nitroglycerine under a tropical sun, and left a bitter aftertaste between employers and employees.
It soon became clear that there was no percentage in trying to make Izzy feel guilty about breaking some holy journalistic covenant of which he was blissfully unaware. His position was simple: he owned the printing press and therefore had first call on what it produced. “I’m not sure that you could make Izzy feel guilty about anything,” reasoned Jim Sward, who spent a decade as the head of Global TV and was well aware of his boss’s foibles. “He isn’t plagued with feeling guilty. If he said the most horrible thing to you in a fit of anger or frustration, 10 minutes later he could laugh at it with you. He would never come back and say, ‘Oh gee, what I said about you, that was awful and I’m sorry.’ ”
That didn’t alter the fact that seldom had a Canadian media group so vehemently condemned its proprietor. Conrad Black, who preceded Izzy in the chain’s catbird seat, had championed causes far to the right of Asper’s, making promiscuous use of his papers to promote personal priorities and champion his neo-con convictions. There was muted concern about a publisher’s claiming his sense of entitlement in print, but criticism of Conrad remained an undertow. As soon as Izzy took over, the undertow burst into a riptide.
This was partly due to the difference in personalities between the two men. Black’s passage through life was marked by his need to presume worship as he bestowed his inflated presence on the anointed—even in jail he managed to scrounge a butler of sorts. He was catered to with such deference in the National Post’s opinion pages that they read like extracts from his own self-congratulatory diary. And that was even after his name change—from Conrad Black to 18330–424.
In contrast, Asper was the Wyatt Earp of the Canadian Plains, a sharpshooting loner with no pretensions but with determination and energy that few could match, or would want to. Self-made to the point of caricature, Asper believed that this was the moment for him to exert the national influence that had always eluded him. It was crunch time for the great agent provocateur of the Second Red River Rebellion.
Next to Izzy and the Fourth Estate, the third defining presence in the rapidly escalating confrontation was David Asper. He had taken issue with his newspaper’s investigative coverage of the Shawinigan affair, which involved allegations that Jean Chrétien had improperly helped a business colleague to obtain loans from a federal banking agency. This came at a time when Black was sparring with Canada’s Prime Minister, who had tried to squash his dream of a seat in the British House of Lords. In the end it turned out that Black could acquire his baronetcy only if he surrendered his Canadian citizenship. This he did with aplomb, since he dismissed those who stayed behind as a bunch of subarctic losers, and good riddance. For many Canadians, the feeling was mutual.
