powerful American businessman — who makes a great deal of noise on these shores about being a champion of freedom and free speech and the free market — asked the BBC to stop showing it so often. But the BBC kept airing the clip and the communists kept complaining and finally the businessman ordered his Chinese network to drop the BBC news channel altogether. He insisted this was a business decision and that politics had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course — and, also, the BBC reporters really wanted to spend more time with their families. But subsequently, the supreme leader of the communists praised him for his "objective" approach to Chinese political news.

As I said, this American businessman is a vocal champion of freedom inthis country. He owns the Weekly Standard, which supports Bill Kristol and many other influential neoconservatives who are passionately committed to spreading democracy to all oil-producing countries. He put all of his media power behind the Iraq War. He cheered George W. Bush as "a man of great character and deep humility." And he's famously touchy about any criticism of his politics — when The Simpsons ran a parody of Fox News that included headlines like "Do Democrats Cause Cancer?" he threatened to sue the creators of the most successful show in the history of his network.

But his friendly relations with overseas communists have proved lucrative. After killing Star TV's BBC affiliate in order to ingratiate himself with China's communist propaganda ministers, he established a contract to help