John Lichfield in the Observer: "In 47 years of journalism, few things have shocked me as deeply as the sight of burning newspaper kiosks on the Champs-Élysées. Journalists are supposed to be neutral observers – impassioned but dispassionate. Forget all that. This was personal. This was an attack on the print newspapers that had been my life’s blood from the day I joined the Bolton Evening News in 1972 until the Independent stopped printing in 2016. This was an attack on something endearingly Parisian, something as instantly recognisable as the Eiffel Tower or the burned-rubber smell of the Métro. What could I do? For once, writing or reporting didn’t seem to be enough. At the suggestion of a friend, I set up a crowdfunder appeal for the stricken kiosk operators. The response was extraordinary – not just from France or Britain, but from all over the world."
Piers Morgan on the Mueller Report on MailOnline: "Once revered newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post are effectively finished as credible purveyors of fair and balanced news. Their sustained, often viciously partisan Russiagate coverage has been dictated not by any ‘higher purpose’ journalistic rigour but by commercial greed: the more they hammer the President, the more copies they sell and website clicks they attract, and the more money they make. And the ‘Trump’s a traitor’ narrative has been their biggest money-spinner."
George Monbiot in the Guardian: "If our politics is becoming less rational, crueller and more divisive, this rule of public life is partly to blame: the more disgracefully you behave, the bigger the platform the media will give you. If you are caught lying, cheating, boasting or behaving like an idiot, you’ll be flooded with invitations to appear on current affairs programmes. If you play straight, don’t expect the phone to ring...Malicious clowns are invited to discuss issues of the utmost complexity. Ludicrous twerps are sought out and lionised. The BBC used its current affairs programmes to turn Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg into reality TV stars, and now they have the nation in their hands."
Dominic Ponsford in Press Gazette on criticism of tabloid coverage of the Christchurch mosque massacre: "We need journalism to continue to hold a mirror up to society, warts and all, so that we can understand what drove men like the Christchurch attacker and find ways to prevent this happening again. While the tabloids make convenient scapegoats, it is the digital giants currently driving them out of business by taking their advertising revenue who we should focus our attention on. And it is the perpetrators of these appalling acts of violence who deserve our scorn, not those who bring us the news."
Jane Martinson in the Guardian: "The failings of social media sites and particularly Facebook are not new, and newspapers crushed by the assault on their revenues have, in the main, led the criticism. So it seems particularly perverse that newspapers themselves acted as platforms for the gunman’s sick footage. If humans are to claim the moral high ground in the way they report stories, they must make better decisions than machines."
Pro-Brexit ‘yellow vest’ activist James Goddard, accused of assaulting Manchester Evening News photographer Joel Goodman, told Manchester Magistrates' Court: “I don’t want the media in here, get them out, I want my family and friends here.”
Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary, in a statement on plans by the BBC to merge Radio 4’s The World Tonight with the World Service’s Newshour: “Creating a shot-gun wedding for these two programmes by having one production team and presenter is a nonsense. The need for well-resourced news and analysis could not be greater as the public attempts to grapple with machinations of Brexit.”
Index on Censorship editor Rachael Jolley, after a survey by Index and the Society of Editors showed 97 per cent of senior journalists and editors in the UK’s regional newspapers and news sites say they worry the local press does not have the resources to hold power to account as they did in the past:“Big ideas are needed. Democracy loses if local news disappears. Sadly, those long-held checks and balances are fracturing, and there are few replacements on the horizon. Proper journalism cannot be replaced by people tweeting their opinions and the occasional photo of a squirrel, no matter how amusing the squirrel might be. If no local reporters are left living and working in these communities, are they really going to care about those places? News will go unreported; stories will not be told; people will not know what has happened in their towns and communities.”
Michael Buerk in the Radio Times on the lack of BBC presenters from a working class background, as reported by the Telegraph: “When John [Humphrys] goes, all four of the Today programme’s regular presenters will have been privately educated, like a quite remarkable proportion of other people working for the BBC, on both sides of the microphone. The same is true across the media as a whole. Even tabloids newspaper hacks have been to Westminster and Cambridge these days.”
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