The Brunch Table

Looks like Bush’s crony Lord Black is now accused of stealing $84 million from one of his own newspaper companies, looking at a life sentence if he’s convicted. Yes, his name is really Lord Black. He’s probably best known in his native Canada for demanding legal recognition of his aristocratic title–and then, in 2001, loudly renouncing his citizenship and moving to the UK when he didn’t get it. But in the States, if you’re not Jewish, or more specifically if you don’t have Jewish Republicans in the family, you probably haven’t heard of Conrad Black, Baron of Crossharbour. (You don’t have to be Jewish, of course, to appreciate the awesomeness of that name. I can only imagine that he turned to publishing after failing to get into Hogwarts.)

Basically, he’s a baby Rupert Murdoch, a foreign friend of the Republican Party who ferrets out new constituencies and tries to trick them into voting against their own interests with a seductive, custom-made news spiel. In 1989, Black bought the venerable conservative Jewish paper The Jerusalem Post (published in Israel, but written mainly by Americans for American readers). He turned it into a Republican organ, part of a broader Reagan-era effort to woo conservative Jews away from federalism, which from the early 20th century up to the present day has meant the Democratic Party. (Since 1868, when the 14th Amendment made institutionalized religious discrimination illegal, voters belonging to minority religions have tended to back the federalist party for their own protection. Stephen Feldman’s book Please Don’t Wish Me a Merry Christmas has more on that history.)

Throughout the ’90s, the revamped Post was made to serve as a “gateway drug,” gently priming its mostly-elderly niche readership for entry into the far larger, Christian-oriented world of Fox and Clear Channel. To use a classic example, a Post article on a Nationalist terrorist attack in Israel might make a casual reference to the subversive anti-war activity of “leftist college professors.” That’s a weird non sequitur in an Israeli context–in a country where military service is compulsory and the most notorious draft-dodgers in public life tend to come from the religious right. But anti-intellectualism is a familiar ideological tack in the U.S., dating right back to our Puritan beginnings (and becoming even more entrenched after universities proved crucial in organizing opposition to the Vietnam War). Growing accustomed to this new vocabulary, I’d bet that after a while the hapless Post reader no longer finds a speech by major Republican mouthpieces like Limbaugh or O’Reilly quite so alien.

If only the upcoming trial could occupy enough of Lord Black’s time to keep him from preying on my relatives in the near future. (To be fair, he sold off the Post in 2004, but its new outlook and function haven’t changed.)