Exclusive NS interview: BBC director general

Mark Thompson on bias, Murdoch & Son, Tony 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", referring to the report into the death of the weapons scientist Dr David Kelly. But Thompson added that in past decades the BBC had a "massive bias to the left", "struggled with impartiality" and was "mystified" by Thatcherism.

The unusually frank comments ...