Green eye-shades

DG Mark Thompson told Andrew Marr this morning that the BBC was right to broadcast Andrew Jennings' latest bundle of issues with FIFA; the Panorama programme, which went out four days before FIFA's votes on the 2018 and 2022 World Cup venues, contained "significant information about matters of very serious public interest and public concern".

"They spent time checking the provenance of this information, putting a number of specific allegations to the people involved, as we must do, and when the programme was ready to transmit, we transmitted it. I have to say that I believe that in the end, although I understand that there are often reasons to believe that transmitting a programme might be impolitic or inconvenient, if you believe that you have a matter of real public concern to broadcast, there have got to be overwhelmingly powerful reasons for not broadcasting."

So he's carrying the can as BBC Editor-in-chief, which is only right.  Let's hope the complaints directed to him are now posted straight to the BBC Trust; there's no point in two "investigations" of the investigaton.   

• PS There's a small prize for anyone spotting the first DG interview which doesn't mention A History of The World in 100 Objects.