Thursday 13 July 2017

Media Quotes of the Week: From defending Laura Kuenssberg and the BBC from Trump-style attacks to media must acknowledge it has a trust problem



Yvette Cooper in a speech to the Fabian Society: "I am sick to death of the vitriol poured out from all sides towards Laura Kuenssberg. It is her job to ask difficult questions. It is her job to be sceptical about everything we say. Nothing justifies the personal vitriol, or the misogyny. It’s straight out of the Trump playbook. And as with Trump, it is part of a wider attack on the very institutions we need to sustain our democracy. Institutions like the BBC which save us from the demagoguery of tyrants or the megaphones of media moguls."


Liam Fox, speaking in the House of Commons, quoted in the London Evening Standard“It does appear that some elements of our media would rather see Britain fail than see Brexit succeed. I cannot recall a single time in recent times when I have seen good economic news that the BBC didn’t describe as ‘despite Brexit’.”


The New European editor Matt Kelly interviewed in Press Gazette a year after the paper launched: “All these old, cynical, bitter losers, were saying online that it’s going to be full of wire copy and that they [Archant] are hopeless, what could they possibly do that would be interesting?...I think it’s essential that our core proposition is that we are a pro European Union newspaper and, until it’s decided, we are the only newspaper that argues that there is no such thing as a good Brexit, hard or soft, and we are unique in the market place in that regard."


John Whittingdale giving the annual  Independent Press Standard Organisation Lecture: "IPSO was promoted as being more independent than the PCC, as having real penalties available to it which the PCC had not had, and also with an ability to initiative investigations...Now I’m not saying that you should start fining newspapers just for the sake of it, or indeed that you should initiate investigations unless they are merited. But I think in the public mind, the public find it difficult to believe that in the over two years since IPSO has been in existence, no newspaper has done anything that merits independent investigation, or the imposition of a fine. "

Whittingdale on hopes of reforming Section 40: "We have a government without a majority in parliament, and that obviously makes the government much less able to be sure of carrying through its legislation, and actually makes it vulnerable to defeat. So even though the Conservative manifesto pledge still holds, I suspect that the “Crime and Courts Act s.40 Repeal Bill” won’t be seen for, certainly, the immediate future."


A spokesman for the Independent after it was accused of lifting freelance court copy sold to Wales Online, quoted by Press Gazette: “We based our report – written in our own words – on material previously published on the Wales Online website, as our piece made clear (with a link back to the Wales Online piece). There is no copyright in news and we have not acted improperly."

Press Gazette also reports: "A local news website [Rochdale Online] has won a legal payout from the Manchester Evening News over using one of its stories [based on a Freedom of Information request submitted to the Parliamentary Standards Authority about former Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk] without payment or attribution...Manchester County Court ordered MEN Media to pay Rochdale Online £200 plus £170 court fees."


Mirror editor-in-chief Lloyd Embley, interviewed by the Drum on the time last year when the paper called for Jeremy Corbyn to quit as Labour leader: “That was based on the fact that 95% of conversations we were having with MPs in the Parliamentary Labour Party were telling us that Jeremy would be really bad for Labour fortunes at the general election. That has turned out to be completely wrong, so of course I would like to turn back the clock on that front.”


Ian Katz in the Spectator: "During the election, it was Corbyn supporters convinced the mainstream media was bent on doing down their man. At Grenfell, it was an alarmingly widespread suspicion that the media — and especially the BBC — were part of an establishment conspiracy to play down the scale of the disaster. For the Finsbury Park attack, the charge was that the sensationalist coverage of previous attacks had whipped up Islamophobia. Saying that trust has been declining in most institutions is a bit like noting that fewer people go to church these days. But confidence in the media has been ebbing quicker than a spring tide...Possibly the most important thing we can do, however, is to acknowledge we have a problem. Right now the media’s attitude to trust brings to mind the proverbial frog in the pan of boiling water. Each increase in the temperature seems just about tolerable, but before we know it we are cooked. And it is starting to feel quite hot in here."

1 comment:

Jack said...

Trump is going to be disastrous for the world. i never seen such a controversial and ill mannered president in my life. I don't know what the US people were thinking when they elected him.