Former Times media editor Ray Snoddy will deliver this year’s Alternative MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival next month.
Snoddy, who edited The Times’ media section for seven years and has been signed up to be an Independent columnist, said it would be a salutary experience “after criticising MacTaggarts in all their forms over the years.”
He joins a list of previous presenters that includes former Today editor Rod Liddle, US news anchor Geraldo Rivera and New York Magazine’s Michael Wolff, BSkyB chief executive James Murdoch and author Douglas Rushkoff.
Snoddy caused a stir in July in the run up to his departure from The Times, with his TV Diary article in the Royal Television Society’s house magazine Television. In the article, he had a dig at his former employer’s policy of “agreed departure”, which saw a number of senior journalists leave the paper. Snoddy made no bones of the fact that he considered he had been sacked. He quoted his “perceptive wife” as saying: “You mean they’ve agreed and you’re departing?”
By Wale Azeez
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