Is the BBC biased to the right?

Columnists quoting the NS Mark Thompson interview miss the point

A last word on my interview with the BBC Director General Mark Thompson last week. It was rather painful, if all too predictable, to read over the weekend several right-wing columnists — including Peter Hitchens and Rod Liddle — leap on Thompson’s quote that the corporation had in the past suffered from a “massive left wing bias”.

Especially as there is a very strong case for saying that the BBC is — if anything at all — in league with David Cameron’s Tories, as we saw last week, if not actively biased to the right, as my colleague Mehdi Hasan argued in an unmissable piece last year.