August 30, 2010

Murdoch and the BBC: They Both Lose

By Michael Wolff

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The MacTaggart lecture is one of the high points of the British media calendar. The climax of the Edinburgh International Television Festival, held each year as an adjunct to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and organized and sponsored by the Guardian, the MacTaggart is a purposeful dispensing of ritual and propriety. The gloves come off. Every year, it seems, the speech gets more and more pointed. The MacTaggart attracts the leading lights of British media, which effectively means either representatives of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which controls SKY, the nation’s biggest...