Veteran Canadian journalist Geoffrey Stevens writes that people should now forget about Conrad Black, who is nothing more than a white-collar criminal and ultimately wasn't a particularly great newspaper operator.

From straightgoods.ca, posted there on March 10:

... Conrad Black may seem larger than life because media barons tend to command more attention in the media than, let us say, widget manufacturers. But in reality he is nothing more than a white-collar criminal, of whom there are growing numbers. Like others, he stole from his shareholders. Like others, he finds himself in prison because he succumbed to hubris, greed and an unshakeable belief in his own entitlement.

Reporters were drawn to Black's story less by the crimes he was charged with (boring stuff about mail fraud and obstruction of justice) than by his oversized persona — by his pomposity, his disdain for lesser mortals (meaning most everyone) and his veneer of erudition.

Black would not like this assessment, but he is just a garden-variety white-collar thief. The amounts he stole were not large in terms of corporate fraud. If there were any pensioners who lost their life's savings due to Black's "corporate kleptocracy," they did not appear at his trial. ...

The absence of sympathetic victims did not deter the media, however. I think Black's trial and imprisonment spelled pay-back time for many journalists. Black did some serious damage when he acquired Canadian newspapers, squeezed them for ever greater profits, fired talented writers and editors for no reason other than to get rid of their salaries, and dumbed down some pretty good titles in name of economics, all the while inflicting his 19th century political opinions on his editors and their readers.

His only Canadian legacy may be the National Post, which stands -- or totters -- as a monument to his huge ego. No one else would have tried to start a second national newspaper in a country of Canada's size. Black did it because he wanted a national platform for his right-wing views. A chronic money-loser, the Post survives because its current owners, Winnipeg's Asper family, feel they need to be able to sell Toronto readers to CanWest's national advertisers.

It's not much of a legacy for a man of Black's pretensions.

FWIW, I don't know of any direct run-ins that Stevens may have had with Black, although I suspect that ideologically, they wouldn't be on the same page.

The thing I found strange about the coverage of the Black trial was the fact that the voices of those who didn't find Black to be a very good proprietor were largely absent from the coverage, while Black loyalists like David Frum got to talk up their old patron.

One of the few who took a run at Conrad was the Toronto Star's David Olive, but he's been tormenting Black when possible for at least 20 years.

Christie Blatchford had nice things to say about her one-time boss, but if memory serves me corrrectly, the National Post also dropped $15,000 on a Concorde flight for her just so she could write about the experience.

Can you say, "dream job?"

Now, the poor sluggos out in the Cranbrooks of the Black media empire, where taking good photos was seen as a problem, or in other tiny papers where there were dark rumours that some publishers made staff bring in their own toilet paper and lightbulbs, may have a different perspective on the issue.