This Media Life

Lord in Vain

It was definitely bad. In a not-very-artful grab, he had siphoned off at least $30 million by declaring a noncompete payment as a personal fee rather than a corporate asset. And every day there seemed to be more unraveling. The opaque complexities of the Hollinger holdings were the opaque complexities of, well, a scoundrel.

At the same time, this scoundrelness, this Kozlowskiness, was somehow hard to ascribe to a man who was on a book tour to promote a biography of obvious merit and substantial scholarship.

The book declared his virtue and his seriousness—his special status. And yet, obviously, blatantly, Mr. Serious had grabbed as many over-the-top and over-the-line corporate perks as he could. The houses (estates) in London, Palm Beach, Manhattan, and Toronto, paid for by Hollinger. The jet, with a $3 million decorating bill. The $8 million in FDR memorabilia purchased by Hollinger shareholders (to be sure, a more tasteful misuse of corporate monies than Kozlowski’s shower curtain). The 1954 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. The wife—Barbara Amiel, a right-wing columnist who became a Telegraph star, who last year told Vogue, “I have an extravagance that knows no bounds.” And, hardly least of all, the peerage that came with being a mogul in Britain. This must have been near the crowning achievement of his moguldom. When his political enemies in Canada threatened to block his ability to accept his seat in the British House of Lords, Black—now Baron Black of Crossharbour—merely gave up his Canadian citizenship (Canada was, he pronounced, an “uncompetitive, slothful, self-righteous, spiteful . . . envious nanny-state, hovering on the verge of dissolution and bankruptcy”).

Still, perhaps, the perks were also, with a little interpretation, about being a serious man. Likely he saw material opulence going hand-in-hand with public eminence (a view prevalent among Tories as well as rock stars). It was not even, perhaps, about wealth, but persona. He was an international man of great affairs—if that be public hubris, so be it. Where other moguls might have been meeting with analysts and sales forces and marketing advisers, Lord Black was hosting dinner parties (one needed great homes for great dinner parties) for the important people and the great minds (ideally the great right-wing minds) of the age.

He was a press lord—rather than an ordinary mogul. He was a press lord in the tradition of Beaverbrook and Thomson, who, also leaving Canada, achieved their true status, as press lords—and real lords—in London.

Indeed, in the U.S., the world’s most coveted media market (the true battleground for media moguls), he was only ever a sketchy figure—at least up until the scandal broke. He had the No. 2 paper in Chicago, once tried (ineptly) to buy the Daily News (from the ruins of Robert Maxwell’s bankrupt empire), and has been associated with various gadfly efforts in Manhattan (a brief attempt to buy the New York Observer, a small investment in the small New York daily, the Sun). But in any sort of concerted or high-profile way, he pretty much stayed out of Dodge.

“He saw the newspaper business as a business for serious and high-minded men, rather than a business about cost-cutting, diminishing returns, and fearsome technological challenges.”

To be a player in U.S. media, to achieve standing and influence in the mogul wars here, would have required a capital-intensive investment in entertainment and technology and complex management and salesmanship. American media was, finally, the realm of bean counters—where was the romance in that? Or, belying his bulldog, suffer-no-fools demeanor, his resistance to the broader media business might well have highlighted an anomaly of temperament. The imperative of the polymorphous media business was dominance, whereas Lord Black was, in his way, looking for acceptance—a desire causing him no end of grief in London, where, of course, he is seen as an interloper.

He did not want to take on (or remake) the Establishment but rather to join it. To be Henry Kissinger’s friend. To be a doyen of conservative café society. To wear ermine in the House of Lords.

So he stayed in the newspaper business. And continued to regard the newspaper business as a business for serious and high-minded and well-connected men (which also supported the exaggerated lifestyles and ambitions of their owners)—rather than a business about cost-cutting, diminishing returns, and fearsome technological challenges.

The romance of newspapers brought him down—that, and the unromantic Rupert Murdoch.

William Randolph Hearst, in the figure of Charles Foster Kane, lost touch with reality, not least of all because newspapers in that day were such an extreme concentration of raw power, vast influence, and disproportionate profit margins. The Daily Telegraph, when Black bought it in 1985 (he bailed out the then-owners from a cash squeeze, which enabled him to take control of the paper in a sweet deal), was selling 1,169,000 copies a day. This was power and cash flow.

But in 1993, Murdoch, who with his down-market Sun had helped ruin Robert Maxwell (the last British mogul found with his hand in the till) in the English-tabloid price wars, launched the quality-paper price wars, pitting his slashed-price Times against Black’s Telegraph.

In the U.K. there has long been a sense of the sacrosanct about the “quality” paper—it is as ingrained as class. Upmarket papers with upmarket readers should have been resistant to price issues. But the Telegraph got whacked—losing millions of dollars a year in the Murdoch price wars and a quarter-million copies in daily circulation.

But it was not just Murdoch. Or it was Murdoch along with the fact that the age of British newspapers as wildly profitable businesses was over. That gains in profit and circulation would come only by taking them from other newspapers and other newspaper owners. And Murdoch, because he wasn’t merely in the newspaper business—and, perhaps too, because his attention wasn’t diverted by an interest in the House of Lords—could lay siege to Black and the Telegraph.

Hence, all of sudden, Conrad Black had an accounting discrepancy. On the one hand, there was the cost of his life of influence and letters and grand bearing and his lifestyle of the rich and famous, and on the other hand, the lesser profits (and by the recession, the losses) from the lower circulation and aging readership—most readers are in their sixties—of the Telegraph.

These are the remains of the day.

Black isn’t the first press lord to be ousted from his realm by the long decline of newspapers, but he may be among the last, and among the grandest—and, too, among the most self-deluded.