Readers of the Golden Heron know that naughty Nelsonia’s Dark Star newspaper is a favourite target of these columns, because they often choose to side with the establishment forces of the oligarchic billionaire bros over the interests of the local populace, our beleaguered ecology & the light forces of social justice. Now, it needs to be reported that the Oak Bay media baron will be retiring as his “hyperlocal” empire goes into creditor protection.

We recently wrote about how we wouldn’t want the Dark Star to fold despite its obvious deficiencies to act as the community-first representative it pretends to be, but in this difficult time for small-scale regional reportage, it’s too bad that Baron Black’s family-run media corporation couldn’t figure out how to stand up for the right thing, as opposed to kowtowing to the wrong things in their pursuit of appeasing the nonexistent centrist white-male readers by engaging in ‘bothsidesism’ which doesn’t make any financial friends in these divided days.

You had to look deep into the Dark Star’s search archives to access the article detailing their impending purchase by the Yankee-owned new buyers, and in typical sugarcoating fashion they don’t mention the whole truth and nothing but the truth as reported by the rival Daily Snooze, which almost gleefully proclaimed how, “Black Press entered the CCAA proceedings — a statute of the Parliament of Canada that allows insolvent corporations owing creditors in excess of $5 million to restructure their business and financial affairs — on Jan. 15, as well as constructing a sales agreement (through a support agreement and term sheet) to Canso, Deans Knight Capital Management Ltd. and Carpenter Media Group”.

The glaring part overlooked by the Dark Star in its fawning press release about its own money-losing ways is the “insolvent” sentence about “owing creditors in excess of $5 million” bucks, which is a big whack of change no matter how you try to spin it. The Surrey-based media empire made a lot of hype and enemies when it bought out the print version of the Daily Snooze back in the day, which eventually led to the demise of the late Kooky Expresso, but now here they are on the wrong side of the creditor protection racket being bought out by a likely Republicanazi-loving outfit from the Disunited States who will probably make the Dark Star even more conservative and right-wing than it already has been as it worships the Nelsonia Police State and kisses the arse of Wormtongue at the Chamber of Commercialism along with the regressive boneheads in charge of Shitty Hall.

Apparently, according to their own words, “the Black family is confident that the restructuring of Black Press announced today will be successful and enable Black Press to continue to provide high quality community journalism, and that the proposed new owners will be excellent stewards of Black Press’ treasured publications”, so we’ll reserve judgement until the proton-blast dust has settled and we see whether the Royal Blacks have any rebellious tendencies left in their supposedly progressive ways. The quartet of scions on the succession program will retain their board seats even though they’re losing more than five-million bones at a pop and can’t pay their debts, so hopefully they can infuse the decaying corpse of their sugar daddy’s operation with some actual truthful journalism without all the pandering to the consumerist propaganda of their WASPy advertisers and white male power-brokers who really call the shots no matter how much they protest otherwise.