Roger Ebert, of course, isn't just any newspaperman. He's one of the world's most famous newspapermen (and I'm using that term not to exclude women who work for newspapers but in the hopes that readers will attach some of that old-fashioned, blue-collar, Matthau-and-Lemon-in-The-Front-Page moxy to the term).
That kind of reputation, no doubt, lets him get away with this column in his paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, that is simultaneously an apology, a rallying cry to colleagues and readers, and a denunciation of Conrad Black and David Radler, the two men who have bought, run, and sold hundreds of papers in their day since they nabbed that first one in Sherbrooke, Que. in the 1960s.
” My beloved Sun-Times has taken some body blows recently. The news that our former top bosses were apparently pirates came as a shock; knowing that the paper was solidly profitable, I assumed they were merely skinflints.”
Radler and Black are now under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Ontario Securities Commission, and the U.S. Justice Dept. on allegations they improperly received millions of dollars in payments from Hollinger International Inc., the company they controlled that owns the Sun-Times and other papers.