Conrad Black Recounts his "Destruction" by Murdoch

Over at Huffington Post Canada, Conrad Black provides an exclusive excerpt of his forthcoming book A Matter of Principle detailing his opinions of Rupert Murdoch, and the feud between the two:

Personally, Murdoch is an enigma. My best guess is that culturally he is an Archie Bunker who enjoys locker room scatological humour and detests effete liberalism. I have long thought that his hugely successful animated cartoon television program, The Simpsons, is the expression of his societal views: the people are idiots and their leaders are crooks.

His airtight ruthlessness does have amusing intermissions. From time to time, he conducts a campaign to humanize himself in the media: dressed in black, with dyed orange hair, pushing a baby carriage in Greenwich Village; explaining to the Financial Times that he was on guard against errors and arrogant misjudgment in his company; claiming to be a churchgoer and mentioning his possible conversion to Catholicism.

[...]

Murdoch had his own motives of course. His New York Post became the outlet for every fictional tale of my enemies and then some enthusiastically invented by the Post itself. One day it would report that I had terrorized a table at the New York restaurant La Goulou after overhearing their table chat. Another time it recounted a negative incident involving Barbara that took place, according to the Post, at a London party when she was, in fact, in New York. The inventions were tabloid gutter, which, after all, has never ceased to be Murdoch's chief stock in trade, in print, and on television. In the post-Enron frenzy, the climate was so hostile to well-paid executives it was hard to rule out anything. I had recently seen Martha Stewart, a casual acquaintance, at a social engagement, and was impressed with her tough Polish Catholic imperviousness to the criminal charges that would lead to her brief imprisonment. I had experienced some of the fury of the corporate governance movement, but rapidly pro-American as I was, I assumed that justice could be had for those who were, in fact, innocent. Whatever might happen, I was going to bear up with as much dignity as I could muster.

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