May 15, 2013, National Post, Conrad Black on Peter Worthington: A fearless newsman with unshakeable integrity, by Conrad Black,

May 15, 2013, National Post, Conrad Black on Peter Worthington: A fearless newsman with unshakeable integrity, by Conrad Black, 


Jack Boland / THE CANADIAN PRESS / The Toronto SunPeter Worthington poses with the portrait of friend and co-founder Doug Creighton holding a copy of the first edition in a 2011 photo. Worthington, the veteran newspaperman who co-founded the Toronto Sun, has died. He was 86.

Peter Worthington was fearless newsman with unshakeable integrity

Peter Worthington was one of the great characters and professional newsmen of Canadian media history and was an authentic expert on many subjects, and a beloved and profoundly admired and liked person across a great swath of Canadian life.

He had a uniquely diverse and accomplished career. Though an unconventional swashbuckler, he had a quiet but not reticent personality, and was in many ways almost an archetypal Canadian: without a hint of self-importance or aggression, but thorough, competent, contrarian, and piercingly witty.

He was a journalist of the old school, who believed in going to the site of a story, often before the story occurred, and he reported on wars and conflicts from the Middle East, Nigeria, Algeria, Angola, New Guinea, the Himalayas and elsewhere, and on the Soviet suppression of the Czech reform movement from Prague in 1968. He relentlessly sought out famous and unusual characters for in-depth interviews, including Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Dr. Thomas A. Dooley, and the democratic leader of Russia between the Romanovs and the Bolsheviks, Alexander Kerensky. He was present at the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of president John F. Kennedy, and covered the trial of Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby.

Related: Legendary journalist Peter Worthington, co-founder of Toronto Sun, dies at 86

Peter Worthington was the son of a general and had the extraordinary distinction of enlisting in the Royal Canadian Navy at age 17 in 1944 and in the Canadian army in 1950, and then in the United States Air Force. He was in combat in the Second World War in Europe and in Korea, and became a junior officer in all three services spanning two countries and two wars.

Having been one of the most prominent and professionally respected journalists of the Toronto Telegram for many years, when that newspaper closed in 1971, he was a co-founder with the late J. Douglas Creighton and others of the Toronto Sun, which published its first edition the day after the last edition of the Telegram.

A rollicking tabloid newspaper of colourful crusades on behalf of good and often unusual causes, built on thorough and spectacularly presented journalism and the comment of a rich variety of flamboyant writers and personalities, the Sun enjoyed a great and almost instant success.


Julien LeBourdais THE CANADIAN PRESS / UPC Peter Worthington in 1982 when he ran as an independent candidate in the Broadview-Greenwood by-election, Toronto.

Worthington, who in his career won four National Newspaper Awards, proved to be a brilliant editor — a wise judge of stories and people who built and sustained tremendous morale at the Sun, which was incessantly communicated to the readers. The somewhat zany ambiance of the paper was illustrated when charges against him and Creighton under the Official Secrets Act for revealing the names of KGB recruits in Canada were rejected and, asked for a comment on the steps of the courthouse, Creighton said: “I’m quite relieved but I imagine Mr. Worthington will appeal.”

Worthington was an independent conservative who sought the Progressive Conservative nomination in the federal constituency of Toronto-Broadview in 1982, and when denied it in a process that he considered violated party rules for qualifying constituency association members, ran as an independent and came ahead of the nominee but second to the NDP candidate, a feat he replicated in the general election of 1984.

He was a tireless Cold Warrior and personal friend of Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, and protected anti-Communist writers such as Lubor Zink.

Worthington was a model stepfather and grandfather, and had a wide and varied group of friends who entirely reciprocated his constant loyalty in all seasons. He was loved by his journalists whom he supported unreservedly as long as they reported honestly, and he almost always overlooked the profound variety of behavioural foibles that abounded at the Sun, beyond even the norm for a metropolitan newsroom.

He was a generous man for good causes, including in particular humane treatment of animals, with his means, his time and his call on public attention. He was philosophical about those who let him down and was rarely surprised or disappointed and almost never angry; he met life’s vicissitudes with stoicism leavened by a sharp wit, right to the end of his life. His resigned absorption of irritations and provocations may have contributed to his four coronaries, the first caused by a computer crash after he failed, in his haste at composition, to notice two minutes of warning messages on-screen.

Peter Worthington was a fearless man of unshakeable integrity and little ego; an eccentric, certainly, but reliable in every respect. All who knew him well will never forget him, nor fail to remember him with deep affection and respect.

National Post