A ferocious war of words has erupted in the Greek press over its coverage of NATO's air strikes against Yugoslavia, largely seen in Greece as a villainous attack on an innocent people.
Some Greek journalists have accused their media of distorting the truth by painting Serbs as the main victims and largely ignoring the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo province.
"The war has been on for about a month and not a single Greek paper has made the refugees or ethnic cleansing its top front-page story," said journalist Takis Michas who works for the liberal daily Eleftherotypia.
Traditional Greek public sympathy towards fellow Orthodox Christian Serbia has been fanned by NATO's air strikes. A recent poll showed 96 per cent of those asked opposed the bombings.
The government has taken great pains to paint Greece as a country with a dual role - a NATO member and a Balkan nation opposing violence. But the press has been holding the Orthodox banner high, with TV channels giving emotive descriptions of "NATO's cynical war hawks" and the "slaughter of the innocent Serbs".
A former conservative minister, Mr Andreas Andrianopoulos, became the favourite punching bag of the press after he contributed a column to the Wall Street Journal Europe on April 14th, listing what he said were several breaches of journalistic ethics.
"The Albanian refugees running from their homes in fear of Serb militias were implicitly portrayed as Serbian citizens escaping NATO bombs. Journalists holding pro-western views are seen as `traitors' while Greek correspondents in Pristina have seen their dispatches totally altered by their editors at home."
Talk-show hosts questioned his motives and the Athens journalists' union, ESHEA, rushed to defend its members and attack Mr Andrianopoulos's article as "unacceptable and insulting".
"We believe that they are doing their job under difficult circumstances and the criticism is unfair," the president of ESHEA, Mr Nikos Kiaos, said. "None of them has told us they are being censored."
Mr Andrianopoulos is a scholar at the US Woodrow Wilson Centre.