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Black founded the National Post and his trial was extensively covered in Canada (and even in the US). He's quite right to presume that his audience know who he
by gruseom 16y ago
Black founded the National Post and his trial was extensively covered in Canada (and even in the US). He's quite right to presume that his audience know who he is and (roughly) why he was in prison. As for how the article's written, your objection is really to the headline, which is scoped somewhat inaccurately. The article itself is written fine. (And I would have said one of its main points is that he didn't really suffer a lot.)
It's interesting that this prominent arch-conservative is, through personal experience, now citing facts and making arguments that are unfortunately nearly exclusively those of the left. It's like the old line, "a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged", in reverse. I wonder if he will do anything about it in the future.
- jleader 16y agoI'd always heard it as "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.'
- jasonkester 16y agoWhy should the reader of a newspaper (or is it a magazine?) be expected to know who founded it? I hadn't realized that this was a newspaper article, but if so that actually makes it worse. A journalist should know how to write in such a way that people don't require external context to process a story.
- JimmyL 16y agoIt should more be considered as an opinion/ccolumn, as opposed to a news story (you'll notice it's in the 'Full Comment' section of the paper). It's also not a one-off piece; since he's been in jail, Conrad Black has continued to write these columns for (what was formerly) his paper about life in prison, what he's been up to, and general news issues of the day. In short, this shouldn't be considered (and wasn't intended) as a news report on life in prison, but rather one person's account of what life was like for them.
- kevbin 16y agoPrisons are a dark corner of American politics where everyone's uninformed preferences produced a system that's bloated, expensive, inefficient and doesn't meet its stated goals. California's prisons are a good example: law and order on the right; tax and spend on the left; public sector unions throughout; massive waste, individual and systemic injustice the result.