Black Berates Newser Founder From Jail

Convicted felon Conrad Black has skipped time in the exercise yard to pen a review from prison of the new biography of his old rival Rupert Murdoch. Black complains that biographer Michael Wolff is at once too deferential and takes "extreme psychological liberties" in The Man Who Owns the News. In reality, Murdoch “is quite pleasant,” Black writes for the Daily Beast, “though he is also one of the very few completely ruthless and totally cynical people I have known.”

Black also denies the book’s assertion that he and Murdoch struck a deal to go easy on each another—claiming that he did in fact have a conversation with Murdoch, but his outlets "only became nastier, and vastly exceeded the eventual mendacity of the lawless prosecutors" who put Black in prison—though he never uses the p-word. Wolff is right to call Murdoch a “manipulative bastard,” he says, but he’s more than that. He’s a classic “great, bad man,” and may be truly evil. (More Rupert Murdoch stories.)