Tony Blair vs. the BBC.(Editorial)

Richard Sambrook had hoped to take the day off. The BBC's news director had been working 17 days straight, fighting an increasingly bitter battle against the Blair government over his organization's coverage of the Iraq war. But last Wednesday he received a "weird" summons from Geoff Hoon, Britain's Defense minister, asking him to meet. At Hoon's office, the two men had what Sambrook calls a "genial" conversation about government concerns over biased war coverage on "The Today Programme," BBC Radio's prestigious morning news show. A half hour later, "I went off thinking, 'What the heck was all that about?' "

Later that evening, Sambrook found out. At 6 p.m., the Ministry of Defense announced that it had its mole: the man it claimed was the single unnamed source for a damaging BBC broadcast asserting that Downing Street had "sexed up" a September intelligence dossier by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of being launched within 45 minutes. But the ministry's man was denying ever having seen the relevant material. Would the BBC confirm that the alleged mole was the story's source? Hoon asked the BBC. No, came the response. "We're not going to play that game," Sambrook told NEWSWEEK.

It's never seemly for a government to bully the press--particularly its own public broadcasting corporation. But for Tony Blair, there's an awful lot at stake. Reliable --or not, the BBC report--coupled with the conspicuous failure so far to find WMD in Iraq--has underscored the public's suspicion that the prime minister may have overstated the case on weapons to get the nation to go to war. Current MORI polls show Blair's approval rating at a mere 31 percent, down from 39 percent a month ago.

Last week yet another BBC story cited a "very senior" British government source saying that WMD would probably never be found. Unable to speed the 1,300-odd inspectors of the Iraq Survey Group into finding weapons on the ground, Downing Street is fighting fiercely for something it hopes it can control: its reputation. "[The BBC] is now saying, 'Nobody ever said the prime minister told a lie,' but that's exactly what they're saying," Alastair Campbell, Blair's director of communications, told NEWSWEEK. "That's pretty heavy."

It's particularly heavy for a politician whose personal integrity helped convince skeptics around the globe that there was a case for war. With a seasoned, reasonable statesman like Blair backing the war, even pacifist Europeans could no longer dismiss the Coalition as a bunch of reckless cowboys. Cynics tempted to dismiss Blair's spat with the BBC as a small-island quarrel miss the larger point: the row, and Blair's tarnished credibility, have underscored growing public skepticism--not just in Paris and Berlin, but in Lon-don and Washington as well--about why the war was fought. To persuade a deeply ambivalent British public, Tony Blair banked not only on his personal gravitas but on the arguments about the threat of WMD. George W. Bush did the same thing in the United States and is increasingly under fire from Congress. Bush's travails have only ...