Elisabeth Murdoch: "It's because the fee is universal that the BBC has a unique purpose"
Elisabeth Murdoch has come out in support of the BBC licence fee in a speech to TV executives in Edinburgh.

Giving the annual MacTaggart lecture, the daughter of News Corporation founder Rupert also praised the BBC for its creative leadership.

Her brother James delivered the lecture in 2009, and notoriously described the BBC's size and ambition as "chilling".

Ms Murdoch also criticised the "dearth of integrity" highlighted in the Leveson inquiry into press standards.

Delivering the Festival's keynote speech, she said the exposure of the "sometimes self-serving relationships" between great pillars of society such as police, politics, media and banking served as a reminder that "with great power comes responsibility".

Referring to the Leveson Inquiry, she said the result should be the "fierce protection of a free press and light touch media regulation", adding that it was hard to argue for this because of the "unsettling dearth of integrity across so many of our institutions."

"Sadly the greatest threats to our free society are too often from the enemies within," she said.

Independence from regulation, she added "is only democratically viable when we accept that we have a responsibility to each other and not just to our bottom line".











MasterChef is one of the programmes made by Shine, where Murdoch is chairman

Ms Murdoch is chair of the Shine Group - which makes shows including Merlin and MasterChef, both broadcast by the BBC.
She was due to speak at the festival in 2011 but pulled out amid the phone hacking scandal.
On that occasion, she was replaced by Google chairman Eric Schmidt.
Ms Murdoch is the first woman to deliver the speech since Janet Street Porter in 1995 and only the fourth since the festival's inception in 1976.
Rupert Murdoch spoke at the 1989 festival.

Agenda-setting The MacTaggart Lecture was named after writer, producer and director James MacTaggart - who died in 1974.
Since then it has established itself as a platform for agenda-setting speeches in the media with attendance by more than 2,000 UK delegates from the broadcasting and media industries.
When James Murdoch took to the floor at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre in 2009, he used his speech to take aim at the UK establishment.
Twenty years after his father delivered the same keynote address, James said a "dominant" BBC threatened independent journalism in the UK.
He also blamed the government for regulating the media "with relish".
James' elder sister used her speech to challenge his assertion three years ago that "the only reliable guarantee of editorial independence is profit".
She said he was "clearly being provocative" but "profit without purpose - or of a moral language - was a recipe for disaster."
While praising the BBC for its Olympic coverage and creative partnerships, Ms Murdoch added: "The BBC needs ITV and Sky to thrive so that they can [all] maintain a position of equality rather than dominance."
After speaking in support of the "universal licence fee", she mentioned that the "biggest challenge" facing the BBC's new director general George Entwistle "may be to demonstrate how efficiently that funding is being spent on actual content on behalf of the licence fee payers".
Ambition Before the phone-hacking scandal, James Murdoch had been widely considered to be the front runner to take over his father Rupert's media empire.
But the row raised questions over his suitability, despite his repeated denials of any knowledge of the illegal practice at the News of the World.












Murdoch is "very ambitious" says Vanity Fair's Sarah Ellison,
 who has chronicled the family business

In contrast, Ms Murdoch distanced herself from the scandal that enveloped her father and brother.
She was the one who suggested to her father that James should take a leave of absence from the corporation and step aside.
Having bought and sold US TV stations before a brief stint working at Sky in the early 1990s, she left the family business to build her own successful TV production company.
Although Shine has now been bought by News Corporation, she has made a point of ploughing her own furrow, away from the rest of the family.
Despite Ms Murdoch's personal ambition and independent success, she does not make many public appearances and her profile is not as high as that of her brother, James.
Speaking ahead of Thursday's lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, media-watchers speculated that the event would be Ms Murdoch's "coming out party".
"This is a very public moment for her and she's been planning for it very carefully," said Sarah Ellison, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, who has written extensively on the Murdoch empire.
"It's a way for her to declare some of her independence from her family."
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Media Show, Ellison said there was "no question" that Ms Murdoch harboured ambition within the family.
"By distancing herself, the bet is that she'll be able to come back at a time when some of the scandal has passed her by, and have a cleaner slate," she said.
"She's very, very ambitious."