"But my favorite was the one about motorway bridges having to have busts of Jacques Delors on them," he said. Delors, a former president of the European Commission and, worse, a Frenchman, was a special target of the British press.

"You know that is not true, but there is always a grain of truth to these stories. In this one, there had been a call in the European Parliament for all publicly funded buildings to be made more aesthetically pleasing," Bell said.

The commission's London office is near Westminster Abbey, in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament. On most mornings, Marsh and Bell connect on a television screen to Brussels for a daily meeting at which press monitors and spokespeople in each of the EU's 25 member nations discuss the day's media strategy, as well as any half-truths and spin that may have appeared in the European media.

"We don't like doing it, but it is a case of having to do it," said Michael Mann, a Brussels-based Briton who used to work for The Financial Times before moving to the European Commission, where one of his responsibilities was monitoring and dispelling Euromyths at an EU-wide level. Last month, he became the commission's spokesman on agriculture.

Mann said there was a regular debate in the commission's morning meeting about whether fighting a misleading story aggressively was the best way to kill it, or whether that simply drew more attention to it.

He also said that rebuttal only worked if the report contained a factual error. If not, and if it is just about exaggeration or opinion, then "you can get into real trouble" if you try to stop a story.

Mann compiled "Get Your Facts Straight," a list for the media relations section of the commission's Web site, europa.eu.int/comm/press_room/. It lists the most egregious stories and, in Brussels prose, tries to explain why they are wrong.