Entries associated with the tag "Susan Berger":

Richard Roeper questions the decision to give a photo of Conrad Black flipping reporters the bird the top prize in the annual News Photographers Association of Canada competition. "It's not even a good picture," Roeper says, eyeing the picture's technical shortcomings. Besides, "it's not even that unusual to catch a public figure in the act of giving the finger these days."

The photo was taken by David Chidley of the Canadian Press outside the Dirksen Building last July as Black arrived for a day of the trial that led to him serving six and a half years in a Florida prison for fraud and obstruction of justice. No, it's not a remarkable picture, and unless we take eyewitness testimony into account we can't even be certain that Black wasn't making some other sort of gesture. Where are the curled upper lip and mob boss scowl that normally accompany a first-rate mimed obscenity?

But on the other hand. Chidley's picture prevailed in the spots news category, where artistry plays second fiddle to immediacy. And the Canadian mind-set must be considered, not merely the preoccupation with all things Black but the normal cultural diffidence. "Canadian notable caught in demonstrative behavior" might have been the subtext that put Chidley picture's over the top.

The worst that can be said about the winning photo is that despite what it shows, it's false to Black. Susan Berger, a Chicago journalist who maintains a a blog on Black  and who alerted me to the win, observed in e-mail that for the most part "Conrad was totally a gentleman who actually enjoyed talking to the press. (I remember many times when his daughter Alana would just touch his arm and give him a look to get him to stop talking to us.) It was like his daughter and wife kept him in check. There is some irony that this photo won an award because it was truly not a depiction of his behavior during the trial but rather just one day when he lost it."

UPDATE: On the other hand ... 

Conrad Black, former owner of the Sun-Times, reported to a federal prison in Florida Monday to begin a six-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud and obstructing justice. His own man to the end, Black posted a statement Monday in Canada's National Post, a paper he founded, insisting on his innocence and declaring that he has "endured the most comprehensive international defamation I can recall in over four decades of close acquaintance with the media." Black noted that since "dissident shareholders" drove him away from Hollinger International, "our successors have made every conceivable business blunder and have eliminated $1.85-billion of shareholder value."

Black reported to Coleman Federal Correction Complex just before noon. In a separate story in the same edition, the Post said Black faces "a bleak and rigid daily prison life that is gruelling in its repetitiveness and fraught with risk." Because Black had renounced his Canadian citizenship in order to be named to Britain's House of Lords, he apparently made himself ineligible for transfer to a presumably gentler Canadian prison and that country's more lenient parole terms. And Canada's Globe and Mail observes that probably because he's British, a foreigner, Black was denied the prison camp in Miami he'd requested. 

But Black's not one for expressing regrets. Yet another National Post story has Black saying of his new home away from home, "I expect it to be somewhat boring," and allowing, "I'd rather do something bookish than physical labour. I wouldn't be the best guy they could have out mowing the lawn but I could do not badly teaching French or something like that." 

Black's downfall remains a huge story in Canada, and Chicago freelance writer Susan Berger was interviewed at length Monday by CBC TV. Berger covered Black's trial in Chicago from gavel to gavel last year and maintained a popular blog she continues to update. In January she passed a chatty evening with Black in Palm Beach.

And as for Black's partner in crime, David Radler, who turned state's evidence and got off easy, he's begun serving his time too.

If you can't get enough of Conrad Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, aka the former Hollinger International  press baron in the crosshairs in United States v. Black, there's a new blog up and running that promises all Black all the time. Blacksjustice.com was launched by freelance reporter Susan Berger, who was a Pioneer Press staffer when that suburban chain was one of the more profitable elements in Black's media empire. Berger plans to attend Black's fraud and racketeering trial, which just got under way in federal court, and she promises ongoing commentary plus links to media coverage beyond Chicago. The volume of Canadian coverage in particular is staggering, and here's a taste of it, an ingenious attempt by the Globe and Mail, Canada's foremost national newspaper, to concoct a think piece out of pretty much nothing. If you thought his lordship had nothing in common with the blue-collar rabble that will be judging him -- a notion the Canadian media  can't express often enough -- well, it seems he has nothing in common with Mies van der Rohe either! 

And also from the Globe and Mail, here's a stylish rant by a former Hollinger editor in Canada that asks, Was it really necessary to destroy the company in order to save it? Joan Crockatt begins: "Conrad Black's trial is a classic case of pride and prejudice. Even Jane Austen couldn't have written a better commentary on the excesses of U.S. society in the post-Enron, post-WorldCom, Iraq-war era. In a nutshell, Lord Black exudes a kind of British aristocratic pride that offends modern-day America. America rails at it. Prejudice grows. Charges are hurled. Blood spills."

The trial's expected to last about four months. 

UPDATE: Want to be a juror in a famous federal trial? Jurors in the pool for United States v. Black had a 45-page questionnaire to fill out before they could even be considered. Go through it yourself. See how it's skewed toward teasing out how strongly you feel that those big shots making millions in complicated corporate maneuvers are all a bunch of crooks.