Prince Andrew interviewer Emily Maitlis to deliver MacTaggart at Edinburgh TV Festival

Emily Maitlis

Emily Maitlis, the UK journalist who conducted the notorious interview that saw Prince Andrew discuss his links to Jeffrey Epstein, is to deliver the MacTaggart Lecture at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival.

Maitlis left the BBC earlier this year having been with the pubcaster for 15 years, latterly hosting its Newsnight show and interviewing major political figures.

Prior to that, she worked for outlets including NBC Asia, TVB, Channel 4 and Sky, establishing herself as one of the big-hitters of UK political journalism.

Maitlis, who left the BBC to join radio group Global, will discuss “the complex world of modern journalism where the threat to reporting the news and holding power to account across the globe, comes not just with intimidation and outright censorship, but in more nuanced ways with language and normalising the extraordinary,” organisers said.

Maitlis added: “The list of extraordinary people who have given this lecture before me makes this an honour beyond belief. It is a massive privilege – but also a responsibility to get this right.

“The need to hold power to account without fear or favour is more urgent than ever before. We are good at documenting censorship and intimidation of journalists around the world. But we are sometimes too slow to recognise how and when it is happening in more subtle ways, closer to home. In many places the political actors, their style of communication and their relationship with the truth has changed.”

Previous MacTaggart lectures have been conducted by Michaela Coel, Dorothy Byrne, Ted Turner, Armando Iannucci, Rupert Murdoch, Dennis Potter, Jon Snow, Elisabeth Murdoch, David Olusoga and last year’s speaker, Jack Thorne.