Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories
A pall of silence has fallen upon the trial of Conrad Black. Or at least that’s how his nibs would describe it. The great unwashed are losing interest. The British papers have all gone quiet, and what reporting there is comes from rewriting wire copy in an office somewhere on the island of Manhattan. The Americans lost the scent ages ago.
This morning, even the Globe failed to report on the goings-on for the first time since it all began in an era we’ve come to know as the age of BS (Before Sukonick). Of course, for the monomaniacal keener there’s always something. An item in the Star reports that Ravelston’s holding company has been given permission by the Ontario Court of Appeal to announce exactly how much Black et al. were taking in the way of salary, i.e., the management fees paid by Hollinger International. This should be good. And Peter Worthington weighed in over the weekend with two columns in the Sun. Since he announced after Week One that Conrad would walk, his take is really an exercise in shoring up the levees in order that his assessment might withstand anything short of a guilty verdict. This includes a critique of the entire American judicial system (too many plea bargains) and the now standard savaging of Fred Creasey’s crappy accounting.
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