Media Quotes of the Week: From yawning at the Leveson Inquiry to keeping your wig on

Lord Justice Leveson...not yawning

The Daily Mail's Quentin Letts at the Leveson Inquiry: "At 11 minutes past midday, Lord Justice Leveson yawned. Possibly my fault. About a minute earlier I had honked a big yawn. You know how it is. One sets off another and my neighbour, from The Times, followed with a real tonsil waggler. That was picked up by a man from The Guardian, who rubbed his sleepy eyes and rotated his neck. Beak Leveson was sitting opposite us, up on his little dais. It was only human but he at least had the decency to try to disguise it. He nibbled the air, just baring the front of his teeth. A ventriloquist’s yawn."

Nick Wood on Rebekah Brooks on MailOnline: "Most of us stick boringly to one party from one decade to the next. Mrs Brooks, central casting’s idea of the eternal courtesan, who would have been in her element in the 18th Century French Court, found it easy to transfer her affections from one Prime Minister to the next."

NUJ FoC Pete Lazenby on more job cuts by Johnston Press in Yorkshire: "Huge amounts of Johnston Press money are going straight into the pockets of the bankers at exorbitant rates of interest.
As usual Johnston Press turns to its workforce to pay the price for this debacle. We are paying with our jobs. Over a period of years the editorial workforce at the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post has fallen by half. Circulations are in steady decline. The sacking of staff will simply reduce the quality of our papers and hasten their decline."

Martin Ivens in the Sunday Times on Leveson: "An inquiry into how crime victims had their phones hacked by tabloid newspapers intending to profit from their private grief (and why the police failed to pursue the perpetrators with sufficient vigour) has morphed into chattering-class navel-gazing. Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, the European crisis threatens to overwhelm us."

Simon Kelner in the Guardian: "Rarely in the field of public inquisition has there been such a knowledge gap between the investigators and the investigated. The Leveson inquiry has devoted huge amounts of time – and public money – to establish facts that were obvious to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the way newspapers work."

Peter Preston in the Observer: "You can go mad trying to define what Robert Jay QC calls "undue proximity" between politicians and journalists – or trying to regulate who sips cocktails with whom. But unless you're going to require journalists and bloggers to embrace such a pettifogging regime too, you're pottering down the blindest of alleys, regulating human nature until your wig falls off."