Media Quotes of the Week: From entrapment won Allardyce nil, to Littlejohn is a Billy Bragg fan

The Telegraph in a leader after its revelations ended the career of the England football manager: "Sam Allardyce has manifestly failed to live up to the standards expected of an England manager. His willingness to engage in detailed conversations with people he believed represented wealthy foreign business interests about how to get around football’s rules show that he is not the man to champion probity and honesty in the game. It is right that he has gone."

Sam Allardyce, as reported by BBC News: "Unfortunately it was an error of judgement on my behalf. I've paid the consequences. Entrapment has won on this occasion and I have to accept that."

Daniel Taylor in the Guardian: "If you have followed Allardyce’s career, the infamous Panorama documentary and the chequered past of his agent, Mark Curtis, it is not any surprise the man the FA appointed in July was ripe for a newspaper sting. It is unusual, perhaps, that it is the Daily Telegraph having a go at playing the Fake Sheikh and there are parts of its coverage that, to be blunt, are questionable, to say the least."

FA chairman Greg Clarke interviewed in the Telegraph:  “Where you don’t have an inquisitive, free press, very dark things happen in the corners of the world, which are hidden. There is nothing wrong with using what techniques you have to use to expose wrongdoing.”

Pope Francis, meeting with Italy's national council of journalists, as reported by the Catholic News Agency: “I hope that more and more journalism everywhere is a tool of construction, a factor for the common good, an accelerator of processes of reconciliation; that it may know how to reject the temptation of stirring up confrontation, with language that fans the flames of division, instead favoring the culture of encounter.”

Nick Cohen in  The Spectator: "Corbyn has no good writers on his side. In my world of liberal journalism, everyone is saying that when talented journalists decide to support Corbyn, their talent abandons them, and they produce gushing pieces that would embarrass a lovestruck teenager."

Roy Greenslade on MediaGuardian: "No publisher, despite differing motivations, can escape the commercial effects of a technological revolution that is in the process of destroying the funding mechanism that has underpinned newspaper companies for more than 150 years. Journalists are aware of this but tend to turn a blind eye to reality. They blame publishers for the cutbacks, or at least, the way those cutbacks are carried out."

How Jeremy Paxman's father, Keith, introduced him to his golf playing friends, according to an extract from his memoir, A Life in Questions, serialised in The Times [£]: “One of those homosexual communists from the BBC”.

Kelvin MacKenzie in the Sun: "I HEAR brown-noser of the millennium Sir Craig Oliver is soon to serialise his book on his five years as Director of Communications for David Cameron at No10. Apparently it’s a dull old tome as you would expect from somebody who started out in life with a diploma in broadcasting from Cardiff School of Journalism. In the book he takes a number of pot shots at this fine organ, and is especially critical of The Sun’s pro-Brexit stand. It’s that very misunderstanding of ordinary people that explains why both Oliver and his boss are now unemployed."

Giles Coren in The Times [£] on his restaurant reviews: "I am fed up with writing elaborate, original articles that veer off at tangents. After all, where has that ever got me? Nowhere. Nothing but complaints about how I seem to think my own life and opinions are more important than the food on the plate. Henceforth, I am just going to phone it in like everyone else."

Paul Farhi in the Washington Post: "Folks, I know a lot of you don’t like the people who work in my chosen profession, the news business. I’m aware you think we’re lazy and unfair (yes, I got your emails and tweets on this topic — a few thousand of them). Of course, I disagree with you. I know a lot of fine people in the newsgathering arts and sciences. But that’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing because I have a request: Please stop calling us 'the media.' Yes, in some sense, we are the media. But not in the blunt way you use the phrase. It’s so imprecise and generic that it has lost any meaning. It’s — how would you put this? — lazy and unfair."

Jose Mourhino responds to his critics in the media, as reported by BBC Sport: “The Einsteins need money to live, they can’t coach, they can’t sit on the bench, they can’t win matches. They can speak, they can write, they can criticise the work of other people, but I am a good man. I am good man of goodwill. I do lots of charity, I help so many people, so why not also feed the Einsteins? That’s fine.”

Paul Holden who runs the Worthing Journal, quoted by HoldTheFrontPage: “If newspapers are to survive, they need to go back to basics and study publications from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, when, if the mayor sneezed, readers knew about it. Those still serving up a diet of 1980s Sun-style headlines and celebrity gossip dressed up as news have had their day.”

Richard Littlejohn in  the Mail: "Sifting through my music, you’d soon come to the conclusion that I lived in a scruffy squat in Islington, subscribed to the Guardian and had a wardrobe full of duffel coats, Guy Fawkes masks and CND badges. My collection reads like an A-Z of agitprop. For a start, I must have a dozen albums by the Left-wing singer/songwriter Billy Bragg, hero of every protest rally over the past 30 years, from the miners’ strike to Stop The War. Truth is, I’ve always been a great admirer of Bragg, aka the Bard of Barking, even though we’re not exactly politically simpatico."

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Media Quotes of the Week: From MP blasts Newsquest for absence of any form of duty of care to staff to those punishing Bake Off headlines

Bromley & Chislehurst MP Bob Neil in a letter to Newsquest CEO Henry Faure Walker over redundancies at the company's South London titles: "I know very well the need for efficiencies and savings, but the cyclical, unrelenting manner in which Newsquest seeks too make these changes - most recently with  the announcement that professional photographers will no longer be used - shows a complete absence of any form of duty of care to its staff, and perhaps more damaging from a reputational perspective, a flagrant disregard to the readers it reports to."

Iliffe Media chairman Edward Iliffe to HoldTheFrontPage on launching a new weekly, the Cambridge Independent: “The structural changes and challenges for the traditional newspaper industry are well documented. But we strongly believe there is a demand for quality journalism, useful information and entertaining content published across multiple formats to local communities,”

The Washington Post in a leader on Edward Snowden, some of whose leaked security surveillance information was published by the paper: "EDWARD SNOWDEN, the former National Security Agency contractor who blew the cover off the federal government’s electronic surveillance programs three years ago, has his admirers. After the inevitably celebratory Oliver Stone film about him appears this weekend, he may have more. Whether Mr. Snowden deserves a presidential pardon, as human rights organizations are demanding in a new national campaign timed to coincide with the film, is a complicated question, however, to which President Obama’s answer should continue to be 'no'.”

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump on Twitter: "My lawyers want to sue the failing @nytimes so badly for irresponsible intent. I said no (for now), but they are watching. Really disgusting."

David Yelland ‏@davidyelland on Twitter: "The US media has an historic duty to question Trump but is weak and oddly deferential to his celebrity status. The networks are worst."

Jeremy Corbyn asked in a Guardian interview what he would have done differently in his first year as Labour leader: “I would be better prepared for the media onslaught. I knew it was going to be difficult. But even I was surprised at the levels of refusal to engage, or to try to understand what we’re trying to achieve.”

The Wall Street Journal in a leader on Les Hinton, former CEO of the paper's parent company Dow Jones, being cleared of misleading Parliament over phone hacking at the News of the World:"The phone hacking practices that led to News of the World’s abrupt closure were 'deplorable.' But those practices were used as a pretext by our competitors in the press and the usual political suspects to malign and try to bring down an entire news organization. Another principal media target of the scandal, News International CEO Rebekah Brooks, was acquitted of all charges against her in a 2014 criminal trial. As for Mr. Hinton, his parliamentary vindication is, as he says, 'too little and too late,' but it should be a warning of the damage that political frenzies can do to the lives and careers of honorable men."

Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors, in the wake of a decision by Liverpool City Council, led by Mayor Joe Anderson, to unanimously vote to support the 'Total Eclipse of The S*n' campaign which has called on newsgagents to refuse to stock and sell the Sun over its coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster: "In a free society people must be free to choose which newspapers they read or sell. The comments from Joe Anderson demonstrate the danger when he says that if he had his way he would ban The Sun. That is what happens in dictatorships and banana republics."

The Sunday Times [£] under the headline 'You’d batter believe it' : "Guess which item of news these headlines from last week were reporting: Crumbs! This takes biscuit (Sun); Bun Fight (Mirror); Desserted (Sun); and — just for a change — Crumbs! (Mail). Has any TV programme in history done more than The Great British Bake Off to preserve the art of the terrible newspaper pun?"

And the puns keep coming from the story that keeps on giving...

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Media Quotes of the Week: How print still beats the web to now nasty Rob Titchener abuses hacks

Jack Shafer on Politico: "Print—particularly the newspaper—is an amazingly sophisticated technology for showing you what’s important, and showing you a lot of it. The newspaper has refined its user interface for more than two centuries. Incorporated into your daily newspaper's architecture are the findings from field research conducted in thousands of newspapers over hundreds of millions of editions. Newspaper designers have created a universal grammar of headline size, typeface, place, letter spacing, white space, sections, photography, and illustration that gives readers subtle clues on what and how to read to satisfy their news needs. Web pages can't convey this metadata because there's not enough room on the screen to display it all."

Allison Pearson in the Telegraph: "It is scarcely credible at the start of the 21st century that the number of national newspaper columnists who went to Westminster, Eton or other private schools outnumber those of us who went to a comprehensive. How is it possible that the kind of school that serves 93 per cent of the population should be so pitifully under-represented among the ranks of those who pontificate on state education about which, to be perfectly fair, they know absolutely bugger all?"

Harold Evans‏ @sirharryevans on Twitter: "For sheer disgusting hyena journalism see -or rather don't- NY Post splash on Clinton sickness."

Donald Trump at a rally in New Hampshire, as reported by the Huffington Post: “I have really good news for you. I just heard that the press is stuck on their airplane. They can’t get here. I love it...They called us and said, ‘Could you wait? I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ Let’s get going, right? Let’s get going, New Hampshire.”

Trinity Mirror in a statement: "Trinity Mirror has confirmed that it will be handing back four of the eight regional Metro franchises it operates to DMGT. The Scotland, Cardiff, Bristol, and East Midlands Metro franchises will be handed back with effect from 1st January 2017 but (it is understood) are likely to be continued to be published by DMGT. Trinity Mirror will continue to operate its other Metro franchises in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Birmingham. Trinity Mirror has run the regional Metro franchises since each was launched over the last 15 years. However, as circulation and advertising revenue has declined, the profitability and sustainability of each franchise for the company has been reviewed."

Metro in a statement: "From 1 October 2016, Metro is set to increase its national print circulation by 10%, increasing the paper's daily print run to 1.477 million – its largest ever. Most extra copies of the newspaper will be distributed in the London area, upping the number available each weekday morning to almost 900,000 in the capital. Metro will be expanding the edition's existing presence on the bus network, with the paper available to even more commuters in London and the South East."

David Walsh in the Sunday Times [£]: "It has always been clear that those with most to hide are often quickest to sue. Putting it bluntly, they use their lawyers to discourage inquiry. This response is now exacerbated by changes in the way we receive our news and the difficulties that have arisen from our industry’s original sin: free content. [David] Simon’s point is undeniable. Proper journalism depends upon an online revenue stream. The irony is that journalism has never been as vital to a country’s overall health as it is now. A current example: there is a sporting body out there, funded by you and I, the taxpayer, who seem almost eager to pass on every difficult question to their lawyers. They employ PR staff but you wouldn’t know this if you emailed a serious question. Instead the lawyers write long letters for large fees. What lawyers love, though, is further correspondence. Most newspapers cannot afford to engage in lengthy legal actions and, of course, this is something the unscrupulous exploit."

Jeff Jarvis in an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg after Facebook took down the famous Vietnam war picture of a girl victim of napalm: "Dear Mark Zuckerberg, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Facebook needs an editor — to stop Facebook from editing. It needs someone to save Facebook from itself by bringing principles to the discussion of rules. There is actually nothing new in this latest episode: Facebook sends another takedown notice over a picture with nudity. What is new is that Facebook wants to take down an iconic photo of great journalistic meaning and historic importance and that Facebook did this to a leading editor, Espen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of Aftenposten, who answered forcefully: 'The media have a responsibility to consider publication in every single case. This may be a heavy responsibility. Each editor must weigh the pros and cons. This right and duty, which all editors in the world have, should not be undermined by algorithms encoded in your office in California…. Editors cannot live with you, Mark, as a master editor'."

Peter Preston in The Observer: "Facebook, though now the biggest carrier of digital news on Planet Earth, says it isn’t an editor or publisher, merely a humble platform. But now watch it change algorithms like any publisher in a jam. Watch it take editorial decisions, switching idiocy for sense. And watch it drain advertising revenue pretty voraciously from the news sites it carries. Dear Mark is part of our news world now. And he needs to be fully, intelligently engaged in it."

Dylan Jones in The New European: "Van Morrison tends to think that most journalists are dumber than cardboard. As one said, he takes to interviews like a duck to tarmac."

Daily Mail@DailyMailUK on Twitter: "Police create crime map that looks like a giant pink penis"

Ben Fenton ‏@benfenton on Twitter: "Slow news day?"

Daily Mail U.K. ‏@DailyMail on Twitter @benfenton: "yes".

Rob Titchener in The Archers reviews the papers: "Here's another one. 'Serial Abuser Posed as Mr. Nice Guy'. My life reduced to a salacious headline. How can they live with themselves inventing this nonsense. These hacks have no idea."

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Media Quotes of the Week: Sunday Mirror rent boys splash accounts for Keith Vaz to Brexit means more expensive newspapers as newsprint rises

MP Keith Vaz on Sunday Mirror revelations about his private life, in a statement to BBC News:"It is deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to have acted in this way."

Daily Mail in a leader: "To the public, isn’t it infinitely more troubling that the politician in charge of scrutinising policy on drugs and the vice trade – not to mention the police – is himself up to his eyes in sleaze?"

The Telegraph in a leader: "This newspaper has argued over many years that MPs sadly cannot be trusted to police their own conduct, calling instead for independent oversight, perhaps from a body similar to the US Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent watchdog solely composed of non-politicians. Mr Vaz is living proof of why politicians cannot be trusted to regulate themselves."

Keith Vaz in a statement on his resignation as chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee: "Those who hold others to account, must themselves be accountable."

Anthony Loyd in The Times [£]:"It was with some surprise watching a video of a victorious band of western-backed rebels that I noticed the face of America’s newest ally in the war against Isis in Syria. It was the face of a man I last saw in May 2014 when he leant forward to shoot me twice in the left ankle at almost point-blank range while my hands were tied. It was punishment for having attempted to escape his gang of kidnappers in northern Syria who had hoped to sell me on. He shot me in the middle of a crowd of onlookers, after a savage preliminary beating, denouncing me as 'a CIA spy'. Now, it seems, he works with them."

Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Joanna Coles, who is leaving to become Hearst's first content officer, in an interview with the New York Times: “I love Cosmo, but I gave it everything I had. I just didn’t have another sex position in me.”

Kenny Farquharson in The Times Scotland [£]: "I have reason to be wary of office awaydays. An old editor of mine once whisked his senior staff to a nice hotel in Troon for a two-day brainstorming session. Drink was taken. Harsh words were spoken. And the hotel burnt down in the middle of the night. An electrical fault, you understand. Nothing to do with us. We all just stood on the lawn in our jammies watching the hotel burn. I can’t recall many bright ideas being generated on that trip but for some time afterwards the atmosphere in the office was a little tense."

Paul Waugh on the Huffington Post: "It wasn’t an easy start to the summit for May, with Obama stressing his priorities are a trans-pacific and US-EU trade deal before any UK-US deal. There was a lovely moment in the presser where the Mail’s Jason Groves asked the Prez if he regretted making his ‘back of the queue’ threat, “or are you really going to punish us for taking a democratic decision?” Obama said 'That’s quite an editorial question…' Quick as a flash, and to laughter, Groves explained, deadpan: 'I work for the Daily Mail'."

Nick Clegg in the Guardian: “The more I governed with Gove and his team, the more I realised he was just striking a series of superficial poses. You’ve got a generation of politicians very close to the media, people like Boris Johnson and Gove, and the problem is, the skill of tossing off 800 words on one subject and then on another a week later is completely different to governing."

Wall Street Journal publisher and Dow Jones ceo Will Lewis, speaking at the NewsMediaWorks Future Forum in Sydney, as reported by Mumbrella: “When it comes to consuming the content that matters, people will choose healthy eating over digital junk food. Trust and confidence in our journalism, I think, is now winning. The appetite for quality journalism is as keen as ever. It is perhaps even keener as audiences find that the fare slopped out by the new entrants and aggregators pumped up on steroid-like venture capital funding isn’t quite to their taste...Journalist freedom, rather than journalism for free is what we should all be about.”

Will Lewis, again speaking at the NewsMediaWorks Future Forum, describes the Independent since it dumped its print edition: "A pitiful graveyard of a website”.

The NUJ in a statement: "Newsquest has put its entire south London newsroom on notice of redundancy, bar the managing editor and the web editor. The company has told its employees that four reporters, two content editors, three subeditors, an editorial assistant and the deputy managing editor will all be cut by mid-October. The remaining staff of 12 reporters and four content editors will be expected to continue to produce 11 newspapers and eight associated websites. The reporters will be expected cover all features, sport and leisure and well as news."

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Giles Coren in The Times [£] has an idea for a new magazine aimed at people his age: "If you are going to try to differentiate between us readers on the basis of age and cater for specific groups based on birthdate alone, then at least do it properly. Give me a newspaper for people of 47. And call it 47 so that I don’t get confused. It’ll be brilliant. Each week I will expect 47 to look at the big stories in news, sport, business and the wider culture and ask how they affect people of EXACTLY 47."

Daily Mail in a retraction: "To the extent that anything in the Daily Mail's article was interpreted as stating or suggesting that Mrs. Trump worked as an 'escort' or in the 'sex business,' that she had a 'composite or presentation card for the sex business,' or that either of the modeling agencies referenced in the article were engaged in these businesses, it is hereby retracted, and the Daily Mail newspaper regrets any such misinterpretation. The Daily Mail newspaper and MailOnline/DailyMail.com have entirely separate editors and journalistic teams."

Oliver Duff, editor of the i, in a letter to readers: "I’m sorry to write to you with unwelcome news. I wanted to let you know that next week, on Monday, the cover price of i will rise by 10p, to 50p...The cost of newsprint alone is increasing by 8 to 12 per cent because of the Brexit fall in the pound, a considerable annualised sum for all publishers."

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Media Quotes of the Week: From why those who believe in a free press should fear Impress to Matt would win gold in the cartoon Olympics

Index on Censorship in a statement: "We are extremely concerned that recognition of Impress has the potential to introduce punitive measures for small publishers and to stifle investigative journalism. We are also concerned about the transparency of its funding. These are factors that threaten freedom of the press... Although Impress has said it would not 'be beholden to anyone' and that a charity would would act as 'buffer' between any donor from which it receives funds, the idea that a single wealthy individual should control the purse strings for a supposedly independent regulator should strike fear into the hearts of those who believe in a free press."

Michael Wolff in USA Today: "There are two clear winners in digital media, Google and Facebook, and their imperial success has largely reduced everybody else to a vassal state, living off their patronage and goodwill. This duopoly has forced the cost of advertising down and the price of traffic up, meaning, for everybody else in the advertising and traffic business, prospects shrink."

Nick Cohen in the Observer: "Optimists might have hoped we would take the opportunity of fast broadband to read more widely, and challenge more preconceptions. Not a bit of it. The better the access to the web many enjoyed, the more they clung to their own kind. The longer they stayed online, the more they turned for comfort to ideologues who shared their ideology."

Philip Collins on The Times [£]: "Mr Corbyn has a theory of politics that is deeply patronising. He thinks the mainstream media, to adopt his strange language, gulls people into their beliefs. He has no faith in the intelligence of the electorate. He is a populist with no regard for the people. His plan was to appeal directly, avoiding the media game."

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Press Gazette reports: "The Independent has grown its audience by 46 per cent year-on-year after moving to a digital-only model in March and closing its print edition, the latest readership figures show. The title has added 6.6m readers to its total daily audience across online and mobile over the last year, up to 21.201m, according to Published Audience Measurement Company (PAMco) data."

Neil Thackray ‏@neilthackray on Twitter: "Will spectacular audience growth 4 @Independent lead 2 revenue & profit?It hasn't done so sustainably 4 anybody else."


 Mature Times publisher Andrew Silk quoted by the Guardian on Jeremy Paxman, who described the free magazine as the "most unfashionable publication in Britain" in the Financial Times: “I see similarities between him and Jeremy Clarkson. He could be Clarkson without the money - Clarkson has made a living from being offensive. Paxman tries to be the intellectual one but he’s lacking the charisma of Clarkson."

Roy Greenslade on MediaGuardian: "It is hugely important to highlight the fact, yes the fact, that opinions continue to hold sway in all news output. That, of course, is the major role of media commentators: to make transparent to as wide an audience as possible, as often as possible, the underlying messages of so-called facts...If journalism is to have any value to society then it has to analyse itself. What is at issue here is truth and trust."

Ben Fenton ‏@benfenton on Twitter: "If cartooning were an Olympic sport, Matt would have won every gold since 1988."

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