LONDON, 10 September 2003 — The BBC, already under pressure over its role in the presumed suicide of a British government adviser on Iraq, faced renewed scrutiny yesterday with the launch of a newspaper campaign to monitor “bias” in its news coverage.

A right-wing daily broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph, announced in an editorial that it would begin reporting three times a week on the political positions taken by BBC reporters. Editor Charles Moore wrote that it was “time to watch the BBC bias that costs each of us 116 pounds ($184) a year” — a reference to the television license fee that funds the public corporation.

The BBC’s coverage of the Iraq war has been thrown into sharp relief by the Hutton inquiry, a judicial probe into the death of David Kelly, a government adviser on Iraqi weapons.

Kelly apparently killed himself days after being named as the source for a BBC report suggesting Tony Blair’s government had embellished intelligence reports on Iraq to justify going to war. In his editorial, Moore said the long-running row been the centre-left government and the BBC — often criticized for alleged bias against the conservative opposition — should not be taken as proof of its political neutrality. “On the whole, the BBC is careful to fulfill its obligations to balance air-time for different parties,” he conceded. The BBC’s bias he said “is not apiece of partisan trickery — it is a state of mind”. The “mental assumptions” consistently made by the BBC and its reporters were those of the “fairly soft left”, Moore wrote, before going on to detail what he considered to be some of the organization’s main prejudices.

“They say that American power is a bad thing, whereas the UN is good, that the Palestinians are in the right and Israel isn’t, that the war in Iraq was wrong, that the European Union is a good thing and that people who criticize it are ‘xenophobic’,” he wrote.

“None of the above beliefs is indefensible. The problem is that all of them are open to challenge and that that challenge never comes from the BBC.” The BBC is regularly accused by the Telegraph — whose agenda is widely seen as anti-European Union, pro-American and pro-Israeli — of taking sides in favor of abortion and homosexual marriage, and against the pope and capital punishment. The Telegraph, owned by Canadian-born media magnate Conrad Black, invited its readers on Tuesday to telephone the paper whenever they noticed examples of prejudiced BBC reporting.