January 2, 2004


BROOKE GLADSTONE: 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 bare its claws, according to Michael Goldfarb, a London-based reporter for WBUR in Boston.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: 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.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about the center?

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: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.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:So when you mention 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?

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: The Daily Mirror, a tabloid which you know, has 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, Brooke, 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 fire fight. 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 Paraded on Iraqi TV. 14 Civilians Killed in Baghdad Market. and Bush Whoops It Up. War? And then this big, bold headline: He Loves It.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wow.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB:And, you know, because the linkage between the prime minister and the president was unique in people's minds -- I mean to show that kind of thing about Bush was condemning Tony Blair by association. And the headlines kept flowing from the Mirror.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But then again, the Daily Mirror was a tabloid, and they're famously hysterical.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB:Yes, tabloids in Britain, as we all know, are famously hysterical. But taking a broadsheet newspaper like the Independent, you know, you began to see headlines with maybe 16 photos of carnage from the war juxtaposed into a --almost a work of art. And then strict across the rest of the front page would be a report by Robert Fisk with a headline like: Amid Allied Jubilation, A Child Lies in Agony, Clothes Soaked in Blood. And then Fisk would continue in his traditional purple prose style, and on the one hand war is a terrible thing, and I was in Iraq, and I saw some pretty terrible things, but you know with Fisk, you know what his point of view is, and he should probably be inside on the opinion pages. Instead, this was kind of like bringing all of the editorial out front, and you began to see how, how the government would begin to feel a bit under siege from this.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And ultimately I guess the Independent submitted to tabloid fever by actually becoming a tabloid.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB:That's right. You have your choice. You can buy the broadsheet paper, if you want to read the Independent as a broadsheet, but they now put the paper out in tabloid size. It's been an amazing success and has added about 30,000 copies a day to their circulation, which is a big number for the Independent.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about those papers that didn't succumb to tabloid theatre -- did they stay circumspect throughout the war?

MICHAEL GOLDFARB:No. This war brought journalism to a new place in this country. In the Guardian, Hugo Young, who was the Guardian's main political columnist and a man who has the stature in this country of, say, James Reston and Walter Lippman -- that is to say, you knew that what Hugo wrote was read in Downing Street, and sometimes attended to -- actually called for Blair to resign. This caused everybody to take in breath. It was as if to say "You don't understand, Prime Minister. You have lost your base by a factor of ten, and I'm calling on you to resign." Hugo tragically died; he was sick with cancer for the last several years. He died during the summer, so that power and pressure has kind of dissipated, because the other people who are calling for his resignation -- and a lot of people are -- don't have his stature.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So Michael, sum up for us then -- will the British government be able to make peace with the British media in 2004?

MICHAEL GOLDFARB:I don't see how it can happen. The British press has decided that it, it will press and press and press on Tony Blair, and of course we have the Hutton Inquiry report later in January, and when that comes out, who knows what will happen? It's a remarkable situation in a democracy, Brooke, to see the press arrogate to itself almost the, the power of being the official opposition.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael, thank you very much.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: Brooke, my pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael Goldfarb reports from London for WBUR and spoke to us from the BBC.

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