Media Quotes of the Week: From The Times says trust traditional media as antidote to fake news to Facebook under fire following Trump's victory

The Times [£] in a leader: "The internet in its early years was hailed as the media’s great diversifier and democratiser. News outlets were able to multiply and challenge established ones quickly and at low cost. This, however, has not meant that consumers necessarily use a wider range of sources. On the contrary, they are more free than ever to read, hear and watch only what they want to and have their views reflected back. Truth and fiction are blurred. Research has shown that fake news is more likely to go viral than real. The argument about whether more of it is produced by the right than the left is unlikely to be resolved soon. In the meantime there is a solution, and you are holding (or at least reading) it....Traditional news outlets such as The Times are the obvious antidote. We offer real news, carefully checked, clearly distinguished from opinion and corrected if found to be in error, and we make no apology for promoting ourselves here. The stakes could hardly be higher."

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet post the Trump victory, as reported by Deadline: “We’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than we talk to — especially if you happen to be a New York-based news organization — and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.”

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump on Twitter: "Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the 'Trump phenomena'."

Piers Morgan ‏@piersmorgan on Twitter: "Love all these pompous US politicians & journalists telling @realDonaldTrump how to now behave as President. He won by ignoring all of you."

Piers Morgan on MailOnline: "The US media exposed themselves, with few exceptions, as a bunch of ratings-and-circulation-hungry Dr Frankensteins who created and ravenously fuelled the monster of Trump the presidential candidate -before equally ravenously trying to kill him off."

Ian McEwan in the Guardian: "This is a crisis of identity, a sense of betrayal, among the incumbent working class of many nations. Doorstep concerns have been too easily dismissed as dimly patriotic, ignorant or racist. The electoral space has been left wide open to the demagogic right, the conspiracy and misinformation websites and cynical tabloids."

Rachel Sylvester in The Times [£] on Boris Johnson: "Having spent years as a newspaper columnist using jokes to disguise his intelligence and being rude about foreigners for comic effect, Mr Johnson seems not to have realised that diplomacy is a serious business."

John Lewis in a statement reported by City AM on the campaign by Stop Funding Hate to get companies not to advertise in the Mail, Sun or Express: “We fully appreciate the strength of feeling on this issue but we never make an editorial judgement on a particular newspaper.”

Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors on Prince Harry: "The Editors’ Code of Practice, which is policed by the Independent Press Standards Organisation, is strict on issues such as harassment and photography. The British press takes the Code very seriously and abides by it. The Code was strengthened after the death of Princess Diana and reporting of Royal stories has been much more considered since then. It should be remembered that the whole of the UK Media agreed a voluntary reporting embargo, arranged by the Society of Editors, while Prince Harry was in Afghanistan which allowed him to carry out his duties with the Army. The embargo was broken only by an American website. Prince Harry is aware of the IPSO system. He has used it in the past so he knows the process."

Peter Preston in the Observer on the complaints against the press by Prince Harry: "Ipso has been a bit thin on its promised self-started inquiries into areas of coverage thus far. It whizzed round a 'desist' letter to editors when [Meghan] Markle coverage seemed to get out of hand, but hasn’t expanded those parameters. Yet isn’t this the perfect, 10-week opportunity to probe and report at the double?"

Letter to the Guardian signed by NUJ secretary Michelle Stanistreet, the Media Reform Coalition and others: "Digital intermediaries such as Google and Facebook are not only amassing eye-watering profits and paying minimal tax in the UK, they are also bleeding the newspaper industry dry by sucking up advertising revenue. As national and local newspapers try to cut their way out of trouble by slashing editorial budgets and shedding staff, journalistic quality is becoming a casualty. Public interest journalism in particular has been hit the hardest as newspapers are lured into a clickbait culture which favours the sensational and the trivial. In the light of this, we propose a 1% levy on the operations of the largest digital intermediaries with the resulting funds redistributed to non-profit ventures with a mandate to produce original local or investigative news reporting."

Roy Greenslade on MediaGuardian: "The digital giants are sucking up advertising, which is threatening the viability of newspapers. More pertinently, and much more significantly, it is threatening journalism itself. That’s why I support the call by the Media Reform Coalition (MRC) and National Union of Journalists to impose a 1% levy on the operations of Google and Facebook in order to fund public service reporting."

The Guardian in a leader: "Facebook wants to publish news and profit from it, but it does not want to act as a traditional news organisation would by separating fiction from facts using human editorial judgment. By relying on algorithms Facebook privileges engagement, not quality. It acts as a publisher without accepting the burdens of doing so."

Fleet Street Fox on her Mirror blog: "I've worked in newspapers for almost 25 years. I've seen people make stuff up, and most of the time they get sued, taken to the regulator, or bawled out because it made the editor look stupid. My copy has always gone through several hands before publication, and it's always been checked - by a news editor, a sub-editor laying out the page, the lawyer or the editor themselves. But in all that time, as the internet arrived and my job changed, I don't think I've ever seen anyone point out newspapers are written by people who think and the internet is produced by people with thoughts. A Facebook image of some words isn't checked by anyone. A tweet claiming Trump just did a thing isn't proof."

Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times: "Only Facebook has the data that can exactly reveal how fake news, hoaxes and misinformation spread, how much there is of it, who creates and who reads it, and how much influence it may have. Unfortunately, Facebook exercises complete control over access to this data by independent researchers. It’s as if tobacco companies controlled access to all medical and hospital records."

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