From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. On Wednesday at a press conference in Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced he was bestowing a gift on the British people by releasing 15 British naval officers detained in Iran for nearly two weeks. By Thursday, they were home.

But if this was, as many suggest, some kind of bizarreo power play, who won? We asked Los Angeles

Times Mid-East correspondent Borzu Daragahi, who covered the story from Tehran and then from

Cairo, where he is now.

He told us that satellite TV outlets in the region approached the situation with far cooler heads than the Western media, that in fact...

They were basically just presenting this as a simple border dispute, and so it was very sympathetic to the Iranian point of

view, both on the Jazeera and Arabian network and in the newspapers. Another interesting point

was the sort of suggestion that they were being paraded about. It was not reflected in the way

Arabs and Iranians saw this. They didn't see it as a humiliation of the British soldiers.

They saw them being well treated and, you know, treated as guests.

And they interpreted it very differently than Tony Blair interpreted it, which was as a violation of international law.

Although the Geneva Convention expressly forbids using captives or detainees for any kind of propaganda purposes.

Yeah, absolutely. Personally, I think this definitely crossed the line.

But in the eyes of many people, it was rather comic and light, you know,

how relaxed they were eating pistachios and so on. People thought it was rather amusing.

Is it fair to say that the reaction to the story in the press reflected just a general

hostility and suspicion towards Britain and the West as opposed to the particulars of this

incident? I think that's absolutely the case. And as a matter of fact, depending on how anti-American, the media outlet was, is just how sympathetically Iran was portrayed in this whole thing.

For example, Al Arabia, which is the number two Arabic language news channel in the world, it's partly owned by the Saudis who are concerned about Iran's rising influence in the region,

was much more balanced in its coverage with regard to who was in the right and who was

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