Well this is fun. From jail, Conrad Black writes a scathing review of Michael Wolff's biography of Rupert Murdoch:
Wolff …. tells us that “two thirds of [Murdoch's] mind” is on newspapers; that Harold Evans, whom he fired as editor of The Times of London, was “really angry at himself”; and that Murdoch, with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, was one of the world “value triumvirate” of the '80s. That honor usually goes to Pope John Paul II. These assertions, and many like them, are bunk.
Black and Murdoch were, you may remember, the generals commanding, respectively, The Daily Telegraph and the Times of London when those two titles engaged in a fierce war for circulation and readership, a war which, most analysts (and Black) will tell you was won by the Lord of Crossharbour.
… [Wolff] should be, but in this case isn't, aware that Dow Jones, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are immune to hostile takeovers because of a two-tiered share voting structure; that it is not the case that media companies were not “respectable on military-industrial-complex-biased Wall Street” (where did Wolff unearth that canard?); that the London Sun did not owe its 4 million daily circulation almost entirely to coverage of Princess Diana; that it is not true that “Murdoch knew beans about television” after he had been in the business for 30 years; and that he knew nothing of satellite telecasting either, even after he had made billions in that business . . .
…In style and organization, this is an irritating book. …If sentences containing “iconic,” transformative,” “ridiculous,” “being and nothingness,” “fragile construct,” and suspended endings (“well…”) were omitted, the book would be at least 20 pages shorter. If Wolff must use French words and phrases, he should at least know their meanings and genders. There is not and never has been a “haute monde.” There are too many sentences without verbs, too many stubby sentences that sound like a parody of Hemingway in Green Hills of Africa. While I have no objection to coarse language, over-frequent and unnecessary use of it is self-indulgent and grating.
Wolff reponds to this, his first “jailhouse book review”.
This is a new sort of Web journalism: dramatically discredited people reinvented as Web opinionists—Slate just hired Eliot Spitzer in this vein—who will work for free. (Tina Brown herself, dramatically discredited in her own way, is using the Web for a similar type of reinvention—though she, presumably, is not working for free.) … The fact, for instance, that Conrad Black is both a subject of my book and a convicted felon (i.e. he’s lied about the very issues I’m discussing) might ordinarily make him a suspect reviewer. But his true function on the Web is not to review, but to be outlandish, part of a new freak show. Black and Spitzer, and, in a way, Tina herself, are not so much to be taken seriously but to be taken as novelty acts. It’s a laughing-at-them thing . . .
I worked for Conrad Black as part of the inaugural staff of National Post and met Murdoch a few months after it launched. Murdoch asked after Conrad and was quite interested to hear how the Post was doing. I've never met Michael Wolff though I loved Burn Rate, his terrifically bitchy Vanity Fair pieces, and think he'd be a fun guy to have dinner with when I'm next in New York.
For those who want a quick summary of Black V. Wolff, Alison Flood writes it all up for The Guardian.