Losing Trust in Auntie Beeb.(British Broadcasting Corporation Ltd.)

Once upon a time its affectionate nickname was "Auntie Beeb." For generations of Brits the BBC spoke with the voice of an elderly relative, revered if a bit stuffy. Fairness and accuracy were its hallmarks.

How times change. The fallout from the Iraq war has revealed the BBC and the government as sworn enemies. The corporation's journalists stand accused of a new affinity for tabloid journalism--bias, sloppy reporting habits and factual errors. They're fighting back, but the charges have cost Auntie the nation's confidence. A recent poll reports that more than 30 percent of Britons say their trust in the BBC has fallen. And as for Prime Minister Tony Blair, so for the BBC: credibility is the foundation of its authority. Says David Cox, a television producer studying the BBC's failings for the Tory party: "It is the last great British institution, after Parliament and the monarchy, to lose the country's faith."

Feeding the public's disquiet is an embarrassingly public examination of BBC practices. For the past five weeks a clutch of BBC bosses have passed through the witness box in the Hutton Inquiry. So too has reporter Andrew Gilligan, the journalist for the flagship "Today" program who broke the original story. The emerging picture is mixed. BBC bosses emphatically backed their reporter even before studying the evidence. Gilligan's written notes of a vital interview are missing. It's unclear whether key accusations were put to the Defence Ministry before broadcast, and straightforward mistakes went out on the air. Last week Gilligan apologized in court for sending an e-mail to M.P.s identifying David Kelly as a fellow BBC journalist's source, and admitted to a series of errors while sticking by the essential points of his story.

Media watchers see the Gilligan affair as just the latest round in a contest that began when Labour won its landslide victory in 1997. In one corner: Alastair Campbell, Blair's former director of communications, a veteran of the aggressive tabloid world, determined to thump home the party's message. In the other: a newly assertive BBC, willing, like other media organizations, to take on the role of opposition left vacant by the ...