Brooks, he said, paid public officials, including a member of the armed forces and a senior defence official, for information while she was editor of The Sun.
Edis quoted a 2007 letter to Britain's press regulator signed by Brooks, in which she said that "no payments are made by The Sun without the written authorization of the editor or the editor of the day".
Former News s of the World managing editor Stuart Kuttner, and ex-news editor Ian Edmondson, have also been charged with phone hacking.
Brooks, her husband Charles Brooks, her former assistant Cheryl Carter, and former News International security chief Mark Hanna are charged with attempting to obstruct the phone hacking investigation in 2011 by withholding documents, computers and other equipment from police.
Photographers have clustered outside the court, known as the Old Bailey, since the trial began on Monday. More than 60 journalists are covering proceedings from the courtroom and an overspill annex.
Edis urged jurors to put aside the copious pre-trial publicity surrounding the case, saying Wednesday the issue they had to consider was a simple one.
"There was phone hacking," he said. "Who knew?"
Brooks, Coulson and the other editors deny knowing about hacking. Edis noted that the News of the World was a Sunday paper, publishing just once a week, so editors should have been familiar with its contents.
"It wasn't 'War and Peace'," he said. "It wasn't an enormous document."
"What you've got to decide," he told the jury, "is how much did they know about what was going on at their newspaper"?
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