Is Irving really different from other papers of a similar ownership in their hiring and business practices?
They’re less different now than they used to be, because the rest of the country has sort of caught up. [The Irvings] had a very tight hands-on control of their journalists before we had Conrad Black on the national scene. Black was very controlling of the junior members of the media, and hired a lot of right-wing columnists and had them run all over the country at his command, and would prevent letters to the editor going in. But he did court the higher-level journalists, paid them a lot of money, and gave them free reign, so there was a bit more range — even in the papers that were considered to be under the most control nationally. I don’t think that the Irvings make such a distinction between the bread and butter journalist and the highbrow columnist — I think they’re all under pretty tight reign. The [Irving papers’] difference for other papers shows the most locally when something is directly within the Irvings’ sphere of influence. If you compare them to the Chronicle Herald,
