Media Quotes of the Week: From scum to scrums

Lord Sugar tells Lynn Barber in the Sunday Times why he was rude to her in the past: “Maybe it was a generic thing, because you’re a journalist. They’re all scum, aren’t they? With all due respect. Now don’t forget to write about my new book.”

Peter Preston in the Observer: "Ah! Let's have a national register of journalists so that hacks who do bad things can be "struck off", just like dodgy dentists. Not so much a new conference idea from the Labour party's media spokesmen Ivan Lewis (one bewilderingly half-endorsed by the Indie's editor) as a skilful reworking of the way General Franco kept Spain's press quiet for 30 years."

Fleet Street Fox on the journalists who tried to be first with the Amanada Knox verdict online and got it wrong: "The internet is glorious because it means if you do make a mistake you can claw it back in a way you can't with a printed newspaper. But it also means that even if you're wrong for only a minute and a half an awful lot of people might get to hear about it and you end up trending on Twitter...And I'm sure our brief errors won't make a damn bit of difference to either Amanda Knox or Meredith Kercher's family, all of whom were subject to far graver mistakes and bad decisions. Most journos do their best, most of the time, but when we naff it up we tend to get it in the neck more than, say, Italian forensic investigators. Ninety seconds doesn't really compare to four years, now does it?"

Hugh Grant in the Independent: "The more that comes out about all this the more we will learn about the true nature of the Prime Minister's relationship with the Murdoch organisation. What I hear on the Cotswold grapevine is that the relationship was sinisterly cosy to a deeply unhealthy and unattractive degree."

Nick Cohen in the Observer on the Leveson inquiry: "I know the people who have been agitating for this inquiry to be well-intentioned authoritarian liberals, who have yet to learn that freedom of speech is a warts-and-all liberty; that the good and the bad, the moral and the immoral, do not come in separate containers, but are always intermingled."

Brian Viner in the Independent on the England rugby team: "The England rugby union player Mark Cueto, asserting that the media have greatly exaggerated his teammates' off-field excesses during the current World Cup in New Zealand, has reported that he has received supportive text messages from his footballing counterparts. This is like recruiting Boris Johnson as a hair stylist, or marching into battle behind Charles Hawtrey."