Brought to book by De Paper

Newspaper proprietors don't have anything like a tough enough time of it (until they end up like Conrad Black). But at least they are forced, occasionally, to suffer the sort of people who work for them. So well done to my former colleagues at the Irish Examiner. I'll let Media Monkey take up the story:

It could be the plot of a rubbish airport novel. Having endured the imposition of cost cuts and a wage freeze, the staff of two Irish newspapers were outraged at their owners' choice of speaker for the company's annual dinner - Lord Archer. The journalists' union at the Cork-based Irish Examiner and the Evening Echo sent a letter of protest to the papers' owner, Thomas Crosbie Holdings, reasoning that a convicted criminal - particularly one who was jailed for perjury in a libel trial against a newspaper - was an unfortunate choice of speaker to address a newspaper publishing group.

TCH got off relatively lightly this time. A few years ago they invited Henry Kissinger to some jamboree they sponsored. On the day of his arrival the Examiner, as it then was, carried a column by Ryle Dwyer about their honoured guest. Curiously I can't find the actual article (NB: this could well be down to incompetence rather than anything more nefarious) but it was either the one with the headline "Time to put Kissinger in the dock with Pinochet" (reaction to it here) or maybe it was the piece (quoted here) that included lines such as:

Even if the IRA were responsible for everyone killed in the North's troubles - that would not be remotely near the number of deaths in which Kissinger was implicated in Cambodia, Chile and East Timor, not to mention his conniving treachery in prolonging the Vietnam War.

Then again, it says something in their favour that Dwyer remains a columnist on the Examiner.

NB: If anyone can correct the gaps in my account, I'd be most grateful