BROOKE GLADSTONE: Oh, what a lovely war of words.

MICHAEL COOKE: I get up in the morning, buckle on the sword and go out and fight the Post. They have no mercy, those people. And neither do we. We put our foot on their throat every day and press down till their eyes bulge and leak blood. But still, they won't die.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's Michael Cooke, recently departed editor-in-chief of The New York Daily News, in a clip from Bravo's new reality show, "Tabloid Wars." The series, which debuts Monday, was a real coup for The Daily News and its longstanding war with The New York Post.

Now, The Post says that it turned Bravo down, but Bravo denies that. It camped out at The Daily News, rolling cameras day and night from May to October, and it found — or made — heroes of several of the ink-stained wretches therein. Even the worst of them appeared at least human, and that's quite a feat in this media-loathing age.

MICHAEL COOKE: I think it's good for people to come into the sausage factory and see what happens in newsrooms. I mean, what people will find, I think, is that the reporters are not these horrible, cynical people. I expect they will see people in some anguish over whether to run stories or not and what pictures to run, how to present those stories. I think they'll be impressed by that, and we might move up on the likeability charts a couple of notches.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Topping that chart, city reporter Kerry Burke, former rock critic, former punk band manager, former Bostonian. [PHONE RINGS]

KERRY BURKE: Daily News.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: We caught him at the office, where he often isn't. He's what they call a runner, the guy who pounds the pavement hour after hour in pursuit of the crucial quote.

KERRY BURKE: Very often, people who don't read the paper walk up to me and say, you're capitalizing on these people's misery. And what they don't understand is that it isn't always just that your daughter's been slaughtered - mind if I can get a pic of the vic and a taste of your heartbreak? You know, it's not that cut and dry.

We go out and we tell these people's stories. And the fact that we do tell their stories is proof positive that not only do these people exist but that they count. You know, they mean something.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Lots of times, he's on the scene just after bad things happen to good people — or bad people. It can be tough to get quotes from those people, tougher still when you're trailed by a camera crew.

KERRY BURKE: I have to get into the building. I have to climb the stairs. I have to bang on the doors. I have to talk to people. I have to get people to talk to me on the record. I have to go in and have a hard look at some of the horrible things that have gone down.

So now I've got a camera crew with me, so it was a more complicated way of doing my job. But we got it done.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you like it?

KERRY BURKE: It was grueling, but, you know, it was a good idea, because I go into people's lives every day of the week, very often on the worst day of their life, and I say, tell me, tell me everything, and then they do.

So, now, these guys roll up with the camera and say, yeah, we want to shoot you doing your job. Basically, it was my turn. If it's good enough for the people I interview, then it's going to have to be good enough for me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you - [OVERTALK]

GREGORY GITTRICH: Sorry.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Does he have to go?

GREGORY GITTRICH: There's a — I don't know what it is, but there's something at 28th and 11th, the E.S.U., and a source just called and said we should get there, so I told Photo. Sorry. Just call me when you get out there, all right?

KERRY BURKE: Yup, sure. Good luck.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Gregory Gittrich, deputy metro editor, is the guy who sends them out. He sends everyone out, and he was wary when Bravo moved in. But that decision was made by higher-ups. Down in the newsroom

GREGORY GITTRICH: No one was thrilled.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: His big worry was that some source would be accidentally exposed.

GREGORY GITTRICH: We weren't concerned that it would happen intentionally. It was a concern that it would happen unintentionally; that by panning across the newsroom or by picking up a phone conversation, that they would out a source. There was also a great concern that it would be a standard, cheesy reality show.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But Bravo put those fears on ice.

GREGORY GITTRICH: They agreed that once they got to the place where they had the footage that they thought might end up on the show, we'd get to watch the raw cuts, solely to make sure that there wasn't any sourcing problems.

The other side of it, the reality show side of it, there was no staging. We made it very clear to them that if they missed something, they missed it. There would be no, hey, can you do that again? And they had no intention, thankfully, of even making those requests.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: No staging, though timeframes were compressed and people talked in jump-cuts with lots of edgy music — not quite like life, but close enough, says general assignment reporter Adam Lisberg.

ADAM LISBERG: They're going to think that nobody ever swaggers around like Kerry Burke, bangs on doors, gets people to talk, talks in this streetwise detective/reporter lingo, but he does. [VIDEO CLIP] [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

KERRY BURKE: We understand there are racial elements. That's what the police say. If you've got a different version of events, then just talk to me. [END VIDEO CLIP]

ADAM LISBERG: The Kerry Burke that you see on the screen is the Kerry Burke that we all see here. [VIDEO CLIP]

KERRY BURKE: Excuse me, I'm sorry to bother you. We're looking for folks who might know Nick Minucci.

MAN: You're The Daily News. You're not - [OVERTALK]

KERRY BURKE: I'm with The Daily News.

MAN: - you're not police.

KERRY BURKE: Nope. I am The Daily News. [OFF-MIKE COMMENTS]

MAN: Will you put my name in the paper with this?

KERRY BURKE: If you want.

MAN: Yeah. [END FILM CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Lisberg says he was just as impressed by crime reporter Tony Sclafani in his star turn on the show, because Sclafani didn't get to cover a high-profile hate crime, like Burke did, in episode one. He had to wait for Christian Slater outside a Broadway production of "The Glass Menagerie" in the hope of a quote from the actor, charged with groping an unknown woman's behind in a bodega.

ADAM LISBERG: A story's a story, and, you know, if you're going to show what life is like at The Daily News, you have to show us working the stupid, pointless stories, too. I thought Tony behaved with absolute grace in that segment. [VIDEO CLIP] [TRAFFIC NOISE] [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

TONY SCLAFANI: Hey, guys. My name's Tony from The Daily News. Did you guys hear about the Christian Slater thing?

WOMAN: Yes.

TONY SCLAFANI: Was he onstage?

WOMAN: Yes.

TONY SCLAFANI: He was? [LAUGHS] How - [OVERTALK]

WOMAN: And when he came out on stage, the whole audience started applauding.

TONY SCLAFANI: He never made a gesture of pinching, right?

MAN: He did. [LAUGHS]

ADAM LISBERG: When? [END VIDEO CLIP]

ADAM LISBERG: If you had said to me on my last night before my wedding that I had to spend hours late at work standing on a sidewalk to try to get a quote from a third-rate star accused of a third-rate groping, I would have been screaming and yelling. I thought Tony behaved with absolute aplomb.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Especially when a passer-by chewed him out in front of Bravo's cameras. [VIDEO CLIP]

TONY SCLAFANI: If Christian Slater comes out and if he says something, it's big news. [OFF-MIKE COMMENTS]

MAN: This is not news! News is thousands of people getting killed in Iraq because Bush lied. This is nonsense! [END VIDEO CLIP]

ADAM LISBERG: The guy screaming on the street's got a point.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Adam Lisberg.

ADAM LISBERG: But we've got Iraq in the paper every day. You know, every dead soldier who dies — in New York, it's a race to get out there and tell their story. But also people buy the paper because they want to read gossip and they want to read about celebrities, and, you know, we got to give it all to them.

I mean, I think The Daily News is a great value. You get everything you got to know. You get your comics. You get two crosswords. You know, you get an awful lot for 50 cents.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Gossip is a big part of what The Daily News offers. It's the great leveler. Sure, the paper shows ordinary people doing extraordinary things, but it also shows extraordinary people doing ordinary things  dumb things. There's value in reporting that, right?  but not necessarily in front of the cameras.

JOANNA MOLLOY: They had to really fight and talk me into it, because at first I thought it was going to be, you know, Kerry Burke and I climbing walls of Jell-O or something.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Joanna Molloy is half of the durable husband-and-wife gossip column team of Rush and Malloy. She had the unsettling experience of watching herself make journalistic sausage. Did you see the episodes, the ones they made available to critics, the two of them?

JOANNA MOLLOY: I couldn't bring myself to watch the second one all the way through. My palms would start sweating every single time. But I did see the first one, yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And your reaction?

JOANNA MOLLOY: [LAUGHS] I need to go on a diet is one. [LAUGHS] You know, because it's NPR, [CHUCKLES] I'm going to completely honest  I do feel that I look like a bit of a flibbertigibbet. See, I always rationalize to myself, well, if I do this column, I can help liberal causes, and, you know, when you have a page in a major metropolitan daily every single day, you try to do some good.

But, you know, what I'm shown doing is, like, talking about the fact that Howard Stern has to clean his doggie's hindquarters because the dog can't [LAUGHING] reach it. And I thought, I have a lot of reflection to do.

I think that through their lens, I saw myself more clearly. And, really, 90 percent of the job is writing about the expansion and contraction of Britney Spears' posterior, and, you know, the spats between Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. And I just don't know if it's worth it any more.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] You're not saying that this has brought a crisis of conscience to Molloy!

JOANNA MOLLOY: It has. [LAUGHS] No, it has. Really, I think that these were very serious documentary makers, and the stuff that they selected to put in has really been an eye-opener for me, and so I have really been examining myself ever since.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You're the first person I've spoken to here who has said that, or maybe admitted that.

JOANNA MOLLOY: That's because Kerry Burke [LAUGHS] and Greg Gittrich have [LAUGHING] nothing to be ashamed of. [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But does Molloy? It's up to every viewer to judge, because as tricked up as some of the action is, "Tabloid Wars" really does offer a taste of how that paper looks and sound — not like The New York Times — more like a Dickens novel, sentimental and sordid, and serialized, as Dickens was, in weekly newspapers. Only this is a daily, and it only has one character, and that's the city.

You don't like seeing the sausage being made? You won't like "Tabloid Wars." You prefer The Times? Lots of people don't like Dickens, either. [PHONE RINGS]

KERRY BURKE: Yeah, Kerry Burke speaking.

MAN: Hey, how are you, brother?

KERRY BURKE: Okay. That dude on the roof, turns out he was partying with some friends last night, had a few too many drinks and passed out at a joint called the Eagle. I think it's a leather bar. Right. We don't want to call it a leather bar if it's not a leather bar.

Actually, I'm looking at online bar reviews &mdahs; "plenty of humpy men clad in leather, Levis and uniforms" - so we can call it a leather bar. Okay, I'll catch you later. [END PHONE CALL] [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Mike Vuolo and edited — by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had engineering help this week from Rob Christensen and other assistance from Claire Peters and Noah Kumin. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcast at onthemedia.org, and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG] (FUNDING CREDITS)