By Michael Soltys, Buenos Aires Herald Senior Editor

For all the mostly justified alarmism, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's U-turn on telephone company participation in broadcasting gives rise to hopes that the media bill may after all end up as fairly reasonable norms to update the military dictatorship's legislation to both a democratic society and modern technology, despite the direst intentions in the original draft. The initial bill was based on three main pillars for a barely concealed agenda - telephone company inclusion at a time when the eviction of Italy's Telecom created a huge vacuum for crony capitalism, a licensing committee to replace Comfer with clear government control (three out of five members) and the atomization of the market by forcing groups owning more than one category to shed all but one of their media within a year.

Now one of these pillars is down, another is already trembling and there is only one to go with an even rougher ride for the bill in the Senate still ahead - any immediate danger of a Telecom-based state multimedia group has been quashed for now and the absolute government majority on the committee is unlikely to survive amendment (perhaps some compromise formula such as two executive branch members, three Congress and two provincial will be found). The dangers to press freedom are far from banished - the Damocles' sword of state review of licences every two years persists and leaving the telephone companies out of the bill creates a new set of risks. Eternal vigilance remains the price of liberty but if this vigilance is sustained, perhaps the sinister aims of this bill can be disarmed.

CFK's retreat owes little to logic or the merits of the case and everything to a scramble for votes, carrying the notion of politics as the art of the possible to the extreme of improvisation. She had evidently seen the slogan of various leftist parties: "Yes to the media bill, no to the telephone companies" (thus confirming a tendency to read the headlines rather than the text) but even if this suffices to sway the votes of 15-20 centre-left deputies, such concessions to the left do not necessarily help in the Senate. The original inclusion of telephone companies obeyed an inevitable technological convergence (with the ability to convert mobile phones into mini-televisions) and this entirely political concession addresses neither this reality nor the dangers of leaving telephone companies beyond legislation.
Whether for better or for worse, the final face of this bill is far from visible.