British Invasion
FCC Follies and Bad Luck Blair
by Nicola Mitchell

June 6, 2003 -- NEW YORK (apj.us) -- I've been in the US for a couple of weeks now, and one news item that has really captured my attention, and that of my mother land, has been the relaxing of cross-media ownership laws by the FCC.

But as much as this issue has both outraged and intrigued us, it has been overshadowed by the latest political cat fight in which Tony Blair has found himself embroiled, and this time it looks as though even Houdini himself would have found this mess pretty hard to escape from.

Ever since the incredibly biased 1996 Telecommunications Bill, many of us have remained twitchy after any sort of media regulation is mentioned by the US -- but this latest bout of relaxed laws really does take the biscuit.

Why don't they just install News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch at the head of the FCC and be done with it?

The FCC claims it is simply moving with the times, but it remains unclear to me why this means a single company is now able to own both a regional broadcaster and a newspaper. What possible good can this offer a small community -- except perhaps robbing them of any local element to their media service while also threatening the independence of the news process as a whole?

I must have missed the re-drafting of the first amendment to read, "monopoly of the press for a selected few giant media corporations."

But enough of my ranting -- and down to the serious business of British PM Tony Blair's latest political misfortune.

We thought we had put much of the criticism of Blair's role in Iraq behind us, but it appears we were wrong as Downing Street is now being forced to shield itself from the growing number of calls for an independent inquiry into the government's use of intelligence reports ahead of the Iraq war.

Many critics of the prime minister say he over-exaggerated the threat of Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction to obtain widespread public support for military action.

What's more, Blair's case has not been helped by comments made by US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz after he claimed oil was the main reason for the war.

Wolfowitz, who has already undermined Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction after describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war, was said to have made the comments in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore.

When asked why North Korea was being treated differently to Iraq, he is said to have replied:

"Let's look at it simply. The most important difference
between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we
just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea
of oil."

At last we hear some words of truth from someone in this administration. Of course this wouldn't be the first time that Wolfy has put his foot in it. When talking about justifications for the war in Iraq in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, he provided the classic quote:

"For reasons that have a lot to do with the US
government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue
that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass
destruction."

Perhaps he can take over from Smirk as the person who says exactly what they are not supposed to whenever there is a journalist around.

And of course while this drama has been playing out, we've also been witnessing the sub-plot taking place at the G8 summit at Evian in which Bush and French president Jacques Chirac have been attempting to patch up their differences by thinking up solutions for economic recovery.

So for now it remains to be seen whether Blair can manage to wriggle out of this latest tight spot. In a bid to make amends the prime minister has promised to produce all necessary evidence to the intelligence and security committee who will be making a report on the situation, and has dismissed as "completely and totally untrue" allegations that Downing Street made up the claims that Saddam was able to deploy his weapons in 45 minutes.

So let's just hope Bush hasn't got any other potential war targets in his sights as it looks as though Blair will be cleaning up the mess left behind from this one for quite some time to come.