The Sun in a leader: "Be in no doubt. Were it not for The Sunday Times, lying Lib Dem toad Chris Huhne would be sitting bold as brass in the Cabinet today. Indeed, he might have been Deputy PM. He was a whisker from beating Nick Clegg to the Lib Dem leadership in 2007. Those urging a Leveson law to muzzle the Press should reflect hard on yesterday’s sensational events."
Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail: "For all its sins, the News of the World did expose the financial and moral shenanigans of politicians. After the Leveson Inquiry, some members of the political class are lining up to do their utmost to make it more difficult for other newspapers to do the same. If we can be sure that without the News of the World, Chris Huhne would still be lording it over us in the Department of Energy, we also have good reasons for wondering whether in a post-Leveson world it would be possible for newspapers to expose the mass fiddling of expenses by MPs."
Ex-News of the World reporter Tim Wood on the Exaro News website on News Corp's Management and Standards Committee: "The MSC was established to counter damaging claims of a cover-up at News International over phone hacking. But I believe that it has gone too far, betraying more confidential sources than any other body or person in the history of journalism."
Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times [£]: "Go to a dentist’s waiting room and look around. Once upon a time this was the equivalent of a prison cell in which it was mandatory to read magazines. What else were you going to do: admire the bad art on the walls? These days everyone is looking at their phones. The other week I saw someone on a train holding a broadsheet newspaper open to read and thought: did he forget his iPad?"
Jemima Khan in the New Statesman: "We all want a hero. After WikiLeaks released the infamous Collateral Murder video in 2010, showing US troops gunning down a dozen civilians in Iraq, I jokingly asked if Assange was the new Jason Bourne, on the run and persecuted by the state. It would be a tragedy if a man who has done so much good were to end up tolerating only disciples and unwavering devotion, more like an Australian L Ron Hubbard."
Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail: "These are sinister times for all those of us who believe in the freedom of the Press, which is under sustained assault from the police and the political class. The sentence handed to DCI Casburn could have been designed to put the frighteners on future whistleblowers. If dozens of journalists were being rounded up without charge in Russia or Iran, the so-called 'liberal' Establishment would be screaming from the rooftops. But when it happens in their own backyard, not a dicky bird."
Peter Preston in the Observer on broadcasters support for statutory regulation of newspapers: "But surely Greg Dyke and Kevin Marsh remember the catastrophe of Andrew Gilligan, David Kelly and the Hutton report? Surely Kevin remembers the Downing Street waves that lapped around him? And surely Greg remembers the vote by the BBC governors – chaired then by a former chief whip – that swept him out of office? It might be helpful at this difficult stage if lovers of editorial freedom rattled the chains that tie them down rather than demanded more chains for everyone."
Former Nottingham Evening Post editor Barrie Williams on Press Gazette: "In Nottingham in 1993 I took on 17 kids straight from comprehensive schools, gave them each a bike and a laptop and let them loose on their own council estates to serve a neglected readership with which most over-educated middle-class ‘proper’ journalists had no rapport whatsoever. I’ve never forgiven my successor for abandoning that project!"
Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman in the Sunday Times Magazine [£]: "We’ve recently grown from a staff of 36 to 50, and as it is I’m already horrified by how little people earn."
[£] = paywall.
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