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Poor widdle Tubby Black.

Oh, pardon me:  Lord Conrad 'Tubby' Black of Crossharbour.  He bought the title fair and square when he relocated to the UK from his native Canada.  (Yupper, the guy is such a dweeb that he bought himself a title.)  It's hard to find a more arrogant jerk, even among the neocons; one has to go to the fiction of J.K. Rowling and Tubby's namesakes and spiritual family, the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, to find comparably-snobbish dorks and dorkettes.

Well, anyway, Lord Tubby, once the owner of a farflung worldwide conservative media empire that at its height stretched from Los Angeles to Jerusalem, the guy who used to be Richard Perle's boss, is now well and truly in the soup.  He's on trial for fraud, and the chickens of his checkered career have come home to roost — or to Chicago, the site of his trial, where our very good friend Patrick "KRS-One" Fitzgerald is slicing and dicing him even as we speak.  And the schadenfreude is so rich it has bioflavonoids.

To understand why Black's downfall is such a big deal, once has to understand his role in shaping what comes to us as "news".   Among the conservative moguls who run our media, four names stand out from the past three decades:  Rupert Murdoch's,  Jack Welch's, Richard Mellon Scaife's, and Conrad Black's.  These four men are, directly or indirectly, responsible for the initial "mainstream" propagation of many if not most of the bogus right-wing "narratives" infecting the press corps over the past two decades. 

Murdoch, of course, we all know about, so there's no need to do a full recap here.  He gave us FOX News, the Weekly Standard, and the New York Post among other things, and former and current Murdoch employees such as David Brooks and Juan Williams have gone on to spread the conservative gospel throughout the mainstream press. 

Jack Welch took a big interest in NBC News, a key GE subsidiary, when he ran the General Electric empire.  A hardcore Republican, he hired former Republican National Committee chair Roger Ailes to remake NBC's news division to his own liking; Ailes would later be hired by Rupert Murdoch to create FOX News.  Welch took great pride in corrupting "liberals" like Tim Russert and Chris Matthews so they could be made to serve his purposes.  He definitely got to Matthews, and was so successful with Russert that Cathie Martin, Cheney's former communications director, considered him a safe journalist for her boss to talk to regarding the Plame scandal.  Welch's partisanship was so blatant that he was rumored to have forced NBC employees to carry out some unethical actions while covering Election Night 2000.  Though Welch technically 'retired' in 2001, he still takes an active interest in what happens in NBC's newsroom — and has been contemplating buying up the Boston Globe.

Scaife, you may recall, is the ethically-challenged wacko who pimped oodles of bogus "Clinton scandals" during the 1990s.  His biggest media holding is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (aka Moonie Times North), but his real claim to historical infamy is his subsidizing of the conservative rag The American Spectator so it could pimp a variety of faked-up anti-Clinton scandals, the most infamous being the Paula Jones hoo-ha. 

It was in the Spectator that the infamous December 1993 "Troopergate" article appeared, wherein Bill Clinton was accused of having an affair with a woman named "Paula", no last name mentioned, while he was governor; when the article appeared, Paula Jones — whose husband at the time was Steven Jones, a prominent Arkansas Republican — then sued for slander.  But she didn't sue Scaife.  Or the Spectator.   Or the article's author, David Brock, who wrote the piece as part of Brock's role in the anti-Clinton "Arkansas Project".  (Brock would later renounce the article after finding out that the troopers were paid for their story; this and other stabs of conscience led Brock to leave the right wing movement.)  Nope — she sued Bill Clinton!   And then, when it was pointed out that Bill Clinton wasn't the person who had trashed her "good name" (though it's questionable whether anyone would have connected the surname-less "Paula" of the article with her if she hadn't stepped forward), suddenly the lawsuit changed focus and became the soon-to-be-dismissed "sexual harrassment lawsuit" Ken Starr's boys used to insert a non-material perjury trap which Clinton managed to evade, though it went all the way to the Senate before a stake was finally driven through its heart.  (Oh, and guess who helped fund that lawsuit?  Why, Richard Mellon Scaife!)  More on the case can be found here.

Unlike Welch, Scaife and Murdoch, Connie Black wasn't that well known in the US, or as blatantly tied to flamboyant and headline-grabbing anti-Democratic oppo schemes.  Of our four conservative media titans, he's the one who, with Jack Welch, has arguably had the most success at gaining the respect of the mainstream.  Scaife's a joke on the order of Sun Myung Moon.  Murdoch's most prestigious holding is the Times of London, but it's suffered a severe quality drop since he took over, to the point where much of the time it's little more than a sleazy scandal sheet.   But Connie Black, via his now-defunct Hollinger International company, once owned the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, which are considered to be among the best major dailies in America.  Of course, he also founded the rabidly right-wing National Post, which has predictably taken his side in the legal battle playing out now in Chicago, and owned the Jerusalem Post — which he ruined by installing cronies like Richard Perle in key staff positions — and the UK's Daily Telegraph.  But by and large, despite his rampant assholery and paper-crippling budget-slashing, his reputation amongst the mainstream press has somehow managed to avoid being as low as is Murdoch's or Scaife's.

But this very perceived legitimacy is part of what made Black so dangerous.  Since more people took him seriously than Murdoch or Scaife, he, like Welch, was able to fly under the critical radars that picked up the excesses of the two other moguls — and thereby have more success implanting the conservative party line into mainstream elite discourse, not to mention our nation's policies.  It's not a pretty sight, as it led, among other things, to the US and UK's neo-colonialist invasion of Iraq.  As The Nation's Naomi Klein writes:

Black is the world's leading advocate of the "Anglosphere", a movement calling for the creation of a bloc of English-speaking countries. Adherents claim that the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand must join together against the Muslim world and anyone else who poses a threat. For Black, the US is not just the obvious leader of the Anglosphere but the economic and military model that all Anglo countries should emulate, as opposed to the soft European Union.

Although the consolidation of the Anglosphere as a political bloc receives far less scrutiny than US military interventions, it has been a crucial plank of Washington's imperial projects. The movement recently gained some notoriety when it emerged that on February 28 the White House had hosted a "literary luncheon" for George Bush and Dick Cheney's new favourite writer, ultra-right British historian Andrew Roberts, author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, an Anglosphere manifesto. But it is Black who has been the linchpin of Anglosphere campaigns for two decades, using his British and Canadian newspapers to reach out and collectively hug his beloved US. In Britain, this took the form of using the Daily Telegraph as a beachhead against "Euro-integrationism" and insisting that Britain's future lies not with the EU but with Washington. This vision reached its zenith, of course, with the Bush-Blair team-up in Iraq.

Black, more than any other major media baron, is wired to the neocon establishment.  It was his cheerleading and his backing of Richard Perle and neocons that did the lion's share of paving the way, both in and out of the US, for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.  For this, and many other reasons, it is quite the pleasure to see Lord Tubby finally getting his comeuppance.  May he soon have company.

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