Friday 18 September 2009

Quotes of the Week

Rupert Murdoch: "I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on portable reading panels than on crushed trees. Then we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions.”

Culture secretary Ben Bradshaw on the BBC Trust: "Although the Trust has performed better than its predecessor, I don’t think it is a sustainable model in the long term. I know of no other area of public life where – as is the case with the Trust – the same body is both regulator and cheerleader."

Guardian News & Media md Tim Brooks Brooks warns staff in a memo that the company is losing £100,000 a day: "We are looking at everything – literally everything – that we do, to see how we can economise, and we will do whatever we can to keep the impact on staff to a minimum. However, because the biggest portion of our costs is people's salaries, we have to review staffing levels."

F1 boss Max Mosley in the Guardian: "The strange thing is that, because there is so much in the press about the Taliban or religious extremists, people are beginning to understand that it's not up to grubby little newspapers like the News of the World or Daily Mail to do the same in England."

Jon Swain in the Sunday Times on the mission to rescue Stephen Farrell and Sultan Munadi from the Taliban: "The overriding purpose of the mission was to save the two hostages’ lives, but a subsidiary reason for the operation was to scupper ransom negotiations. Intercepted telephone conversations revealed that the Taliban were demanding a large ransom for Farrell. If paid, any ransom would swell Taliban coffers, enabling them to buy more weapons to kill British and other Nato troops."

BBC director general Mark Thompson in MediaGuardian: "I would rather the BBC was abolished than we started encrypting news to stop people seeing it. The absolute first building block keystone of the BBC is delivering impartial, unbiased news."

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