Matthew Norman: Media Diary

With no option but to lob in my twopenneth, we must begin the search for something fresh and original without delay. Right, that's not working at all. Every conceivable comment about the speech has been written, and you begin to wonder whether the wisest response might have been to pat the Prime Minister on the head and whisper, "There, there, it'll be all over soon."

That's not how things work, however, and of the many miscalculations in that keynote address, perhaps the most foolish was the failure to realise journalists adore nothing so much as ego-boosting, head-on assaults from those in power, however fleeting their grasp on it may be. So it is that scores of us now celebrate this new-found status as feral beasts on the overgrown adolescents' networking website Facebook, and we'll touch on this below.

Writing before the weekend offers up the work of Martin Kettle and John Rentoul, meanwhile, the most fervently supportive commentator so far has been The Guardian's Polly Toynbee. The sheer malevolence of the press (especially the Daily Mail) and its destructive impact on public confidence in politics (see John Lloyd, below) has long been one of Polly's pet topics, and she asserts Mr Blair was "dead right about the British media" with the same absolute certainty with which she lambasts those taking the opposing view. Can none of us find the judicious tone on this one? In fairness, Polly does acknowledge the PM's subservience to Rupert Murdoch, and in this lies the obvious central point about the whole business: that even if the PM did have anything valid to say (and bits of it made some sense), he was the last person on earth with the right to say it. It was all a bit like hearing Hitler making a radio address in early 1945 about the extreme difficulty of finding decent potato latkes in Berlin.

The one thing yet to be observed about the speech, on reflection, is that Mr Blair intended it to be an immeasurably more scathing attack than it was. We gather that, before delivering it, he sent the text to Ofcom, which toned it down drastically ... unsurprisingly so, given its rigid opposition to the sort of regulation the PM had in mind. God knows what lunacies were expunged, but if anyone cares to pass on the original, we'd be most grateful.

As for the venue, the Reuters Institute, we have a tiny hunch about that. The speech's tone seemed mildly influenced by John Lloyd's 2004 meisterwork What The Media Do To Our Politics, in which the author savaged more serious titles for questioning Mr Blair's honesty over Iraqi WMD while largely ignoring – does this ring any bells? – the ethics of the Murdoch tabloids. Whether Mr Lloyd helped the PM in preparing it we cannot speculate, but by the happiest of coincidences he does happen to be a director of the Reuters Institute.

And so to the "Feral Beasts of the Media" group on Facebook, which by Friday had 236 members, having been set up by Paul Mason, the business and industrial correspondent on Newsnight. Looking at the other members, it's hard to be sure from the fuzzy picture whether it's that Charlie Kennedy (which reminds me of the fella in the pub who, slurring, tells his missus she's had too much to drink. "How do you make that out?" she asks. "All your face is blurred," he says) but Eileen Wise from the Reuters press office shows admirable chutzpah in joining, having helped organise the very speech. So does David Wooding, Whitehall editor of The Sun, joint champion (with The Times) of Blairite sycophancy. As for Kamal Ahmed, who as Observer political editor was as devoted a Blair groupie as ever there was, it's here that words begin to lose their power. Perhaps someone might end this confusion by inaugurating the rival "Toothless Tabbies" group forthwith.

Gently humorous reports about a spoof diary purporting to be written by new BBC3 controller Danny Cohen send me to "The Secret Blog of a TV Controller (Aged 33 and three-quarters)". Apparently "the talk of the industry", this is lauded by message-board contributors for its sparkling parodic wit. Perhaps you need to be in TV to enjoy the full hilarity, but here's a taster. "Let's face it," opens one entry. "There's always a Jew-sploitation edge to their criticism of me. 'Oh, he's so shrewd, so cunning.' They may as well just come out with it and call me Fagin. They think we Jews are like a drug cartel running the media, controlling what the public consume, making a mint in the process. Well, let me be completely straight with you here: we are." We'll pass lightly over other similar references, because panic-buying of ribcage repair kits is the last thing we need, but it brings to mind Keith Chegwin moaning on Extras about how the BBC is run by Jews and gays. I should mention that Mr Cohen is a friend, so perhaps the next entry should return to the Zionist conspiracy controlling the media. More on this, I have a feeling, next week.

Returning to the speech, finally, how depressing to hear an old friend ridiculed at PMQs for asking Mr Blair why he "pulled his punches" in his landmark address. If MPs had known what we now know about Ofcom's censoring, they might not have laughed at Gerald Kaufman so raucously. Has the loss of Sir Gerald as chair of the media select committee ever been more keenly felt?