On The Beat A Warring Fleet Street Is Nirvana For News Junkies, Reports European Bureau Chief...

As usual, the British newspapers are at each other's throats. The left-leaning Guardian is accusing the hard-core conservative Daily Mail of trying to be the nation's film censor. This time the Mail is trying to get Adrian Lyne's "Lolita" banned in Britain. Previously, the Mail has led campaigns to ban such explicit films as "Crash," "Kids" and "Natural Born Killers."

The Guardian story follows an attack by many of Britain's biggest dailies against Rupert Murdoch's upscale broadsheet, the Times. The paper was accused by its rivals of ignoring the story about their owner's efforts to get his Harper Collins publishing house to drop a book critical of China -- ostensibly because it could damage Murdoch's business interests there.

For a news junkie like me, one of the great things about living in London is not just that there's so many newspapers, but the fact that they're so wicked in their coverage of each other.

The Times and its upmarket rival the Telegraph never miss an opportunity to belittle or besmirch each other -- a slight dip in circulation by one is duly noted in print by the other -- usually on page one.

Same thing with working-class rivals the Sun and the Mirror, which slug it out for "World Exclusive" gossip.

Nearly all the national papers are owned by giant media companies that also have interests in TV, radio, magazines and film. All of those outlets can be used in the battling, making for a sort of multimedia warfare.

It's fascinating stuff. But it sometimes makes me think back wistfully to actress Barbara Bain's dog, who was killed by the Sunday Los Angeles Times in the early '80s.

Or at least that's what we reported over at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner -- a thin but scrappy paper that was soon to meet its own end.

My fellow reporters got a tip that a newspaper boy had hurled the Times' behemoth Sunday edition onto Bain's porch and had accidentally killed her pooch. We recounted the sad tale in a somber tone.

We also ran an editorial cartoon. It depicted a cop, notebook in hand, talking to Bain. Beneath them was the dog, flattened, big Xs in his eyes, the Times laying atop him.

The cop was saying to the actress: "Y'know, Miss Bain, this never would have happened if you had been taking the Herald Examiner."

In L.A., those days are gone. But here, Fleet Street lives on.