The bias of the BBC with respect to the British and American war
effort in Iraq, mentioned in this space last month, has
contributed to a formal complaint to the Corporation by the
British Conservative party leader, Iain Duncan Smith. Mr. Duncan
Smith was particularly incensed by coverage of the recent local
elections in Britain, in which the Tories did very well, although
the BBC’s commentators minimized their successes. Citing the
views of Rod Liddle, a former editor of the BBC radio “Today”
program, Mr. Duncan Smith noted that “He says it is not just by
accident, it happens all the damn time … . They set their mind
about how they perceive you and report you and do nothing but
report in that light. They should be news-led.”

Mr. Liddle’s is an interesting case. While working at the BBC he
also wrote a column for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in
which, last September, he defied his bosses at the network by
expressing a forcefully negative opinion about the Liberty and
Livelihood march by the Countryside Alliance in opposition to the
Labour government’s attempts to ban fox-hunting and to pass other
policies
detrimental to farmers and landowners. Mr. Liddle
wrote that the sight of so many toffs, as he saw them, marching
for even more money and the right to go on killing foxes would
remind people why they had voted Labour in the first place. But
if this was a view widely shared at the BBC