Information is power. (Media - Comment).

There's quite a collection of characters among those who own or have owned media empires.

Publishing millionaire Robert Maxwell either jumped, or fell, or was pushed off the back of his luxury yacht near the Canary Islands in 1991. Shortly after his death, it was discovered he had stolen almost a billion dollars from his employees' pension fund.

William Randolph Hearst inherited the San Francisco Examiner and from it built the biggest newspaper chain in the United States. His papers were full of lurid sensationalism, exaggeration, and outright lies, which became known as "yellow journalism."

Rupert Murdoch inherited a daily newspaper in Adelaide, Australia and used it as the launching pad for the creation of one of the world's biggest media companies, News Corp. His biographer, William Shawcross describes him as tough, and merciless, a man of relentless ambition with a string of broken promises and betrayals behind him.

But, we don't have to look to Australia, Britain, or the United States for larger-than-life media tycoons. Canada has produced more than its fair share.

Max Aitken was born the son of a preacher in 1879 and grew up in New Brunswick. By 1910, he had made a fortune out of a cement company merger. He covered his tracks well but two of his biographers have found enough evidence to suggest the fortune was based on a swindle. Max Aitken moved to England and built a newspaper business that included Britain's biggest daily, The Express, as well as The Evening Standard and The Glasgow Evening Citizen. He was granted a peerage and chose the title Lord Beaverbrooke. But, he couldn't shake off the reputation of being a "shady financier," and one of his fellow peers, Lady Astor, called him Lord Been-a-crook.

Roy Thomson was another self-made multi-millionaire. Born in Toronto in 1894 the son of a barber, he started his own radio station in North Bay, Ontario in 1931 with borrowed money, a borrowed transmitter, and a borrowed licence. Soon, he began buying more radio stations and then newspapers. Roy Thomson's publishing ventures were not noted for the quality of their journalism. It was said that a typical Thomson newspaper had an editorial staff of four, of whom three sold advertising. Thomson was infamous for penny-pinching at his papers, which lowered their quality to the extent that, as columnist Peter C. Newman put it in 1991, "no self-respecting fish could bear to be wrapped in one of their papers." By the time he died in 1972 Lord Thomson of Fleet, as he became, owned more than 200 newspapers, plus radio and television stations in Canada, the U.S., and Britain.

Conrad Black used the same strategy as Roy Thomson in building a newspaper empire that, at its peak, was the third largest in the world. After buying a paper, many of the editorial staff would be fired and the remainder forced to produce twice as much copy. He has described journalists as "ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest, and inadequately supervised hacks." He too has left his native Canada to become a peer of the realm, Lord Black, in England.

Most of these media moguls are driven by the recognition of the power of the press. William Thorsell, former editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail has described Conrad Black as a man who, "Wants to be very influential through newspapers. It's personal. I don't think he wants to do it because of his ideology. He wants to play a great role, and he wants to express his power, like an unelected politician."

That has been echoed by Jim Travers, a former employee of Mr. Black's. "He wants to be the dominant media baron of his age. He wants to influence politics without experiencing the discomfort of running for office."

Which brings to mind the famous quotation of the American journalist A.J. Liebling that: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."