Hollinger's Black, Radler to repay loans; CanWest eyes Jerusalem Post?

[bemildred]

TORONTO (CP) - There
were new developments
in Conrad Black's
Hollinger newspaper
empire Friday as Black
and associate David
Radler moved to repay
loans while a potential
buyer of the Jerusalem
Post hit the headlines.

Black and Radler
announced that they have
sold 1.3 million preferred
shares to pay off some
loans. And U.S. news
reports say Winnipeg-based CanWest Global Communications, Canada's largest
newspaper company, is in talks to acquire the Jersualem Post from Chicago-based
Hollinger International, the operating company for holding company Hollinger Inc.
(TSX:HLG.C).


National Post (Canada)

[Spazito]

1. It doesn't suprise me if CanWest is involved...

they lean right and probably want to help out a "buddy". I dispise Black and hope he goes down in flames, he deserves it.

[gula]

2. I don't know about his sons but wasn't Izzy Asper of

CanWest an avowed Zionist? It would make sense that they want the Jerusalem Post.

While I don't like Black he was way better than Asper what with him replacing editors and anybody else who disagreed with him. I haven't ever bought one of his papers.

[iverglas]

3. and Liberal

Izzy was a big-time Liberal (actually, on the left wing of the party way back when, with Mel Hurtig, around 1970) and buddy of Jean Chrétien. Which would make for no love lost between him and Tubby Black, one would think.

If you live in a city served by (and only by) one of the papers in question, you'd hate Black if for no other reason than what he did to it. You must not remember what *he* did when he acquired them.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,1087589,00.html

Conrad Black does not suffer self-doubt. At the age of just 25, he wrote to offer his services to a Canadian senate committee investigating the mass media. "My experience with journalists," he volunteered, "authorises me to record that a very large number of them are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest and inadequately supervised."

At the time, Black was publishing a couple of Quebec local newspapers. His views on journalists have not softened over the years - the investigative variety, he once remarked, are "swarming, grunting masses of jackals" - but the size of his publishing business has been transformed.

The size of his empire has been transformed indeed. Ah, change ... it just never stops happening. ;)

My subscription to my local expired a couple of months after he bought it and I did not renew, and was at a loss to understand why any of my fellow burgers (the ones I know, all the good guys) did. We do buy the Saturday edition for the funnies, and we took up their offer for 3 months for the price of the weekend papers last fall -- hey, we got the paper, the carrier got paid, and it cost them money -- but when they called to get us to sign on regular-like, I declined of course.

Things have not improved to speak of under the Aspers ... we still have the moronic "ask a religious expert" weekly column introduced under Black, where the rightest-wing clerics from various religions get to pontificate about issues of the day and the soul ... but they sure haven't got worse.

Anyhow, yeah, the Jerusalem Post and the Aspers do sound like a match made in heaven, just what I thought. Although nobody much could be more zionist than Black.

.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

4. Hurtig really blasts the Aspers in his latest book though.

Now, he considers them as bad, if not worse, than Black.

[gula]

5. If I remember correctly, when they took over the Gazette

they fired some people they didn't agree with and others left in disgust. There was a big to-do. Anyway the only thing I miss are the crossword puzzles and I can't find them on the on-line version. :grr:

Since I live in Montreal, I switched over to the French papers a few years ago. We are lucky here that we have a choice.

[iverglas]

6. for crossword puzzles ...

You want the Globe cryptic. Although it's never been the same since the author died a few years ago.

Also Harper's cryptic. Allow me to give Harper's a plug again: http://www.harpers.org -- cheapest magazine deal around ($14/yr in the US, $24 Cdn in Canada, cheaper for two years). Although I gather Vanity Fair is hugely cheap too. My Harper's has actually expired, so why don't I go renew it on line right now, and maybe get a Vanity Fair too ...

Re Hurtig and Asper, yeah, change happened.

Btw, our Australian colleagues know the Aspers too, even if they don't know it: Ten Television is CanWest Global's ... ah, and New Zealand too: http://www.ketupa.net/asper.htm He also went after a network in the UK, unsuccessfully.

I always figured that was why we got endless reruns of The Flying Doctor at midnight on Global for years. ;)

.

.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

7. And yet, we didn't get Shortland Street, a far superior Antipodean soap.

[iverglas]

10. now I'm envious

Had never heard of that one -- Coronation St and EastEnders are my foreign soap fare, along with the odd other thing I catch if it comes along. Adrenaline something, a Brit hospital drama on Showcase on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, seems to qualify. (Or is that not the name, and I'm thinking of the Australian Adrenaline Junkies one whose time slot it's in ...) Caught a couple of Neighbours, never took to it, but I get the jokes about it now. Now, was it Shortland Street a NZ board buddy of mine said to watch a couple of years ago? Some network here, maybe Showcase, was carrying it at some odd late-afternoon time, and I just kept forgetting to watch/tape it. The one she was talking about apparently has a couple of good Maori characters.

http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/ShowMainServlet/showid-2531/
-- couldn't figure out what network in NZ Izzy's boy would have to buy to get it (or whether he already has it?), but apparently the UK network that carries it has reduced the areas where it's shown, to outcry.

You're too new to have ever caught the execrable "Riverdale" on CBC, I'll bet, although maybe in reruns. Coronation Street wannabe, really just a US-style soap with Jayne Eastwood tossed in for working-class comic relief. I was eager to like it when it was announced, but it was dreadful.

PBS's EastEnders are archaic, but I'd stuck with them hoping one day to catch up; instead, they pre-empt them more and more and we get farther and farther into the past. (Even the CBC is months and months behind on Coronation now.) BBC Canada's (we subscribed a few months ago) are a little more recent. So Grahnt Mitchell's gone!! I got a kick out of the Prime Suspect a few years ago when Tennyson told somebody they had descriptions of a suspect from a bunch of witnesses, but they'd all described Grant Mitchell.

Another advantage of living in Canada -- a respectable selection of international TV fare!

.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

11. Yeah, Shortland Street is set in a small NZ Hospital

There are a couple of prominent Maori characters, one of whom is considered quite the hottie, apparently.

[Spazito]

8. Izzy might have been a big Chretien supporter but...

imo, that had more to do with "connecting" than a political philosophy. Izzy did everything he could do to bring down the CBC, he failed thankfully!

[iverglas]

9. I liked this bit

from the site I linked above:

In 1995 CanWest made the highest bid for Britain's Channel 5 television network (now controlled by RTL) but was reportedly rejected by regulators unhappy with its programming plans. Claims in Canada that it is "nothing but toll collectors between Canadians and their access to popular American shows" have resulted in defamation action.

They're making a few Cdn shows these days, but I haven't paid much attention. Just not a Sonia Smits fan; they killed her off back on Street Legal not a day too soon.