From WNYK. From W.N.Y.C. in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. In 2003, we monitored the tug of war between the news media and the Bush administration,

in which reporters have been accused of being both too timid and too critical. In Britain, however,

the conflict has blazed into full-scale conflagration, most notably when a reporter for the usually circumspect BBC accused the government of sexing up its case for war in Iraq. A soft-spoken government scientist was named as its source and killed himself amidst a frenzy of publicity. As a result, both the Blair government and the BBC were forced to testify in a public inquiry

that will release its findings later this month.

But the Beeb is not the only news outlet to bear its clause, according to Michael Goldfarb,

a London-based reporter for WBUR in Boston.

This was the year where all the gloves came off. From the right, you would almost expect it.

I mean, Blair is a Labor Party member, but from the left, the viciousness was quite astounding.

What about the center? Well, you know, the BBC is meant to be as fair and neutral a provider of news as there is in this country.

And suddenly the government and the BBC were in front of a public inquiry unprecedented,

defending their reporting, in the case of the BBC, and the government defending its own case for war.

Extraordinary stuff.

So when you mentioned open warfare between the media and the Blair government, what else are you thinking of?

What paper took off its gloves that customarily would have kept them on?

The Daily Mirror, a tabloid, which had several million readers, was so against this war that

its front pages became kind of propagandistic works of art.

In the first week of the war, I want to describe this headline to you.

You have a front page, tabloid front page.

The top of the page is a girl running screaming from a firefight.

The bottom half of the picture is President Bush, smiling and shaking hands with a crowd. And in the middle of this

juxtaposition is this enormous headline. He loves it. And the subhead is dead British troops

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