The NYT looks at a Bravo miniseries on the newsroom of the New York Daily News -- something that's surprisingly sympathetic to its subjects.

An excerpt:

Tabloid Wars” is not really about the circulation battle between New York’s two famously competitive tabloids. In this series The New York Post is barely seen. Mostly the rival’s name is invoked with smoldering hatred, like Osama bin Laden or Moby-Dick.

Instead the series follows reporters and city editors as they scramble to cover hate crimes, cop shootings and celebrity scandals. At a news meeting a top editor asks for an article that is “joyful, wonderful and uplifting.” The city editor replies warily, “The battery acid attack story is as uplifting as a battery acid attack story can be.”

Yet it quickly becomes apparent that newsrooms are not as callously reckless as the film “Absence of Malice” suggested, nor as cynical and high-spirited as they appeared in “His Girl Friday.” A lot of newspaper work is frustrating and unproductive, and the dedicated reporters and editors who put in the time and legwork seem almost touchingly grateful for the occasional adrenaline rush that comes from making deadline and beating the competition.

Bravo labels “Tabloid Wars” a look inside a “fast-paced, cutthroat newsroom,” but it lingers on the human decency hidden behind gruff exteriors and thick New York and Fleet Street accents.

And the Daily News employees are obviously sensitive about how they are perceived by the public. Over and over they stress their desire to get the story right, whether it is a racially motivated killing in Howard Beach, Queens, or the death of James McNaughton, the first New York City police officer killed while serving in Iraq, who was shot by a sniper on Aug. 2, 2005. “It’s a chance to tell the city who this person was and what he sacrificed,” says Gregory Gittrich, the deputy metro editor, about his staff’s dogged hunt for the dead soldier’s friends and relatives. “Then you have a good story, a meaningful story, and you’re not just taking advantage of the situation.”