What to make of Blair’s attack on the media?

This was an oddly defensive speech from a normally robust orator. It tells you a lot about Blair’s preoccupations that he left his big statement on the media till this point: it is obviously a subject that has gnawed away at him. He says he’s not playing the blame game, but it’s hard to see how calling the media a ‘feral beast’ can be interpreted any other way. New Labour was very happy to tango with the media until it went wrong – most spectacularly over the Iraq dossiers and Hutton. We’ve had Brown admitting in the past twenty four hours that the Government was wrong over the dossiers. Does Blair agree with his successor? I don’t think it’s wrong for journalists to explore politicians’ motives: indeed, a proposal cannot be properly understood without a grasp of the motive that underpins it. Nor do I think that the proliferation of new media is bad for politics: quite the opposite.