Media Blitz: A Personal Battle

by Nega Mezlekia

In November 2000, Nega Mezlekia, an Ethiopian immigrant, won Canada's most-coveted literary prize the Governor General's Award for Literature for his autobiography, the first book he published. Immediately after, the freelance editor that he had hired to tidy up the early drafts of the manuscript came forward claiming to be the actual author of the memoir. She took her case before the nation's media. It was a time when two of Canada's national newspapers, the Globe and Mail and the National Post , were engaged in a pitched battle not only over circulation but also for the title national newspaper. Launched only two years earlier, the National Post was to be the flagship journal of its parent company, Hollinger, which owned 60 percent of Canada's print media and ranked third in the world. (Worldwide, Hollinger controlled some 600 newspapers and magazines.) Owning the Globe and Mail was the Thomson family, whose wealth ranked first in Canada and whose tradition of running newspapers spanned three generations. Both had the will and the wherewithal to prevail in the bruising battle. Taking up a stand against Nega, the National Post waged a media crusade the likes of which had never been seen in Canada. The authorship dispute was relegated to a secondary position when the National Post got hold of Nega's unpublished work and reproduced pages of excerpts, deliberately distorted. The news dominated the headlines for months. In Canada, there was scarcely a major newspaper that didn't report on it. The scandal got an even bigger audience when newspapers like the New York Times and the Boston Globe picked it up. In Media Blitz , Nega recounts the personal suffering that he endured for the next seven years. Much of what he reports is unknown even to people who followed the case, as it was revealed during the libel suit that he instituted against the National Post , when the newspaper's lawyers were forced to submit the documents. In Media Blitz , Nega also exposes the darker side of the Western legal system, which the mainstream media seldom mentions. (Nega's legal battle concluded in April 2008.) Media Blitz also shows us how, even in the age of the Internet, media moguls still reign supreme.

250 pages, Paperback

First published March 12, 2009

About the author

Nega Mezlekia (Amharic: ነጋ መዝለክአ; born 1958) is an Ethiopian writer who writes in English. His first language is the Amharic language, but since the 1980s he has lived in Canada so speaks and writes in English.

Nega was born in Jijiga, the oldest son of Mezlekia, a bureaucrat in the Imperial government. Although initially supporting the revolution that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie, he grew strongly critical of the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. As a late teenager he abandoned his mother and siblings and set off with his best friend to join one of the armed rebel groups. In 1983 he left his position at Haramaya University to accept an engineering scholarship and study at Wageningen University. After two years in the Netherlands he was still unable to return home so moved to Canada instead. He has still never returned to Ethiopia.

He recounted his life story in his first book, Notes from the Hyena's Belly. Published in 2000, his book won the Governor General's Award for English language non-fiction that same year.

Mezlekia followed it up with the novel The God Who Begat a Jackal, which concerns an old Ethiopian myth. Although he still is a practicing engineer he indicates that he misses that sense of myth and spirituality from his youth.

(from Wikipedia)