Exclusive NS interview: BBC Director-General

Mark Thompson on bias, Murdoch, Blair and his own future.

The BBC director-general Mark Thompson has said that "impartiality" is "going up and up the agenda" at the corporation in what he described as a "post-Hutton change" in a reference to the report into the death of the weapons scientist Dr David Kelly. But Thompson added that the BBC has in past decades had a "massive bias to the left", "struggled with impartiality" and was "mystified" by Thatcherism. The unusually frank comments...