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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Business
Matt Wells

Media Talk: Edinburgh TV festival special

We're at the 2009 Media Guardian Edinburgh International TV festival with a special edition recorded live in front of an audience of top TV executives. (There's a video version too, if you can bear to see us in vision.)

James Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corporation (Europe and Asia) set the tone for the festival in the James MacTaggart memorial lecture, with a strongly worded attack on regulation and the BBC, saying that profit was the only "reliable guarantor" of editorial independence. We ask if he's right.

We hear from David Simon, creator of the cult US cop show The Wire, talking to Charlie Brooker about what motivates his work and the messages he wants to deliver through his programmes.

In our news-in-brief section, we discuss the row between Murdoch and the BBC's Robert Peston over dinner, Peston's lecture to the festival in which he said it was inevitable that newspaper websites would start charging for content, and the BBC1 controller Jay Hunt's criticism of the media coverage of women.

And we ask why the TV industry appears to be in collective denial about the issue of publishing the salaries of top BBC stars, despite the likelihood of a Conservative government deciding to implement the policy.

Plus, we've got the best of the funniest moments from this year's event.

Thanks as ever for listening, and do leave your comments below.

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