Getting to know Izzy

ROBERT MATAS

This is the third in a monthly series co-ordinated by the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library and the Jewish Independent, featuring local community leaders reviewing books that they have recently read.

It was a moment in the media world that journalists talked about for years afterwards. Izzy Asper's speech to senior staff at a struggling New Zealand television in 1992 left no doubt about how he intended to run his company.

TV3, the country's only privately owned station, had been placed in receivership. Asper's company, Canwest, acquired management control. Shortly afterwards, Asper met with the top managers and asked them to describe their jobs. They talked about creating great dramas for posterity. Asper responded with a lecture on what he saw as the basic principles of commercial television.

Peter C. Newman, in Izzy: The Passionate Life and Turbulent Times of Izzy Asper, Canada's Media Mogul (HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.), recounts Asper's blunt portrayal of the broadcast business.

"You've all described what you think your jobs are but none of you have put your finger on what this is all about," Newman quotes Asper as saying to his managers. "That's why you're in bankruptcy.

"I'll tell you what your job is: it's to sell soap; it's to sell pantyhose; it's to sell cars. And the way that you do that is to put on programming that everybody wants to watch and that our advertisers will pay to be part of, in order to sell their soap, pantyhose and cars, and give us the money to provide the wonderful programs that will attract the audiences."

At the time of his speech to TV3, Asper was still in the process of acquiring the pieces that were to become Canada's third national television network. He was eight years away from buying Conrad Black's chain of Canadian daily and weekly newspapers, but his approach to the media never wavered. He saw the media first and foremost as a business opportunity.

Newman writes that the so-called soap speech, showing him as soulless and purely profit-oriented, was quoted against Asper more often than anything else the proud Winnipegger, ardent Zionist, generous philanthropist and astute businessman ever said. Asper later acknowledged that he had offended those who believed their programs were an art form with inherent value, whether the audience watched them or not. However, Canwest saved their jobs at TV3, while also producing a sizeable profit within a year.

In his entertaining, easy-to-read biography of Asper, Newman spends considerable effort trying to reconcile the public image of the fiercely independent, aggressive entrepreneur with the person Asper believed he was. Although not an authorized biography, the book is stocked full of revealing anecdotes and insightful conversations, offering a portrayal of Asper that the media mogul himself, despite his litigious nature, would likely accept.

Newman begins by drawing parallels between Asper's character and the city of Winnipeg. "To an astonishing degree, the Asper saga is the history of modern Winnipeg and vice versa," Newman writes. Winnipeg is an inviting and forgiving place, proud of its accomplishments yet obsessed with a sense of exclusion. Similarly, Asper, with his warm, gregarious personality, was the often-underestimated outsider.

In a lapse into parlor room psychoanalysis, Newman attributes much of Asper's boundless ambition and unrelenting combativeness to his early experiences growing up and his relationship with his father, Leon, who died when Asper was 29 years old.

Newman traces Asper's steps from a career as a highly successful tax lawyer to an ineffective Manitoba politician to the head of a profitable private investment company. Newman offers a taste of the intricacies of the business deals that made Asper into a billionaire media mogul, only occasionally bogging the reader down with arcane financial details.

Newman pays close attention to the influence of Asper's views on anti-Semitism and his commitment to Judaism and Israel. Similarly, Newman attributes deep significance to Asper's love of jazz. Turning a spotlight on an area often overlooked, Newman also writes about the numerous charitable and educational projects in Canada and in Israel financed by the Asper Foundation.

Asper referred to the foundation as his fourth child. In the four years before his death in 2003, it gave away more than $100 million. Always the entrepreneur, Asper did not want the foundation to become one of the public funding agencies for the Jewish community. He preferred to develop projects that he believed in but would not be done without his leadership.

Five years after his death, Canwest is now trading as a penny stock, at a fraction of the price for Canwest stock at the time of his death. From Newman's book, it's clear things would be so different if Asper were still at the helm.

Robert Matas is a national correspondent for the Globe and Mail, based in Vancouver.

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