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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