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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Business
Matt Wells

Media Talk for Friday April 28

Subscribe free to Media talk, via iTunes • Listen to Media talk on your PC • The podcast feed URL

They say timing is everything - but they obviously didn't tell Charles Clarke. At the start of the week the home secretary was attacking journalists for deliberately distorting the government's approach to security legislation; by the end of the week he was fighting for his political life, hung out to dry by the press after the prison service carelessly mislaid 1,000 foreign prisoners it was supposed to have deported. Our panel, Kim Fletcher and Emily Bell, wonder why politicians so often blame the media when things get tough.

We hear from some of the people running British broadcasting - Peter Fincham of BBC1; Andy Duncan, Luke Johnson and Kevin Lygo at Channel 4 - in a significant week: the BBC announced wide-ranging ambitions for the digital future, while C4 revealed big profits and a video-on-demand service.

Rodney Pinder of the International News Safety Institute calls for politicians to intervene as the death toll of media workers spirals, previewing a debate at the International Press Institute global forum later this month.

And Gareth McLean speculates about the siblings of Patience Wheatcroft, the newly appointed editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

Comments, complaints and suggestions here; or you could record your comment as an MP3 file and send it to us at media@theguardian.com - put "podcast" in the subject line. We'll play the best ones in next week's Media Talk. We wonder what to call these - someone suggested "voiceposts", as "voicemail" is already taken - anyone got any better ideas?

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