Media Quotes of the Week: From Russia with tweets as troll army invades British media to journalists are the enemy of the 'bad' people

From the Guardian: "Members of a Russian “troll army” were quoted more than 80 times across British-read media outlets before Twitter revealed their identity and banned them, a Guardian investigation has shown. Some posts from the accounts were embedded in articles to provide apparently local reportage and pictures from the sites of disasters and crime scenes around the world. In fact, Twitter claims, all the accounts were run from the offices of the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, alleged to be the headquarters of Russia’s troll army."

David Aaronovitch in The Times [£]: "The innovative parts of the cyberworld are to me still wondrous and magical. I am of the generation that started journalism in the slow, inefficient era of the cuttings library, and today the Google algorithm is my gold. But as the Times’s revelations about Russian meddling in the Brexit referendum shows, the development of social media and even of search engines happened far more quickly than our capacity to understand how they might be abused."

Ben Bradshaw MP in Parliament: "When the news website BuzzFeed ran a series of articles recently about unexplained Russia-related deaths in Britain, its head of investigations, Heidi Blake, was inundated with American intelligence sources complaining that they did not think their British counterparts were taking these incidents seriously. If that is true, it is extremely worrying."

Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer about a video clip posted by Leave. EU: "The video was a clip from the film Airplane!, in which a “hysterical” woman is told to calm down and then hit, repeatedly, around the head. The woman – my face photoshopped in – was me. And, as the Russian national anthem played, a line of people queued up to take their turn. The last person in the line had a gun. So far, so weird. Here was a registered political organisation that had gained the support of millions of law-abiding, well-meaning people, promoting violence against women and threatening a journalist. It was a “joke”. A joke underpinned by violent menace."

Owen Jones in the Guardian on Paperchase stopping advertising in the Mail: "Paperchase bowing to pressure from campaigners and committing to no longer advertising in the Daily Mail has upset all the right people. It is a victory for basic decency. Britain’s tabloids are among the most hateful and vicious in the western world."

A Mail spokesman in Press Gazette: "It is it is deeply worrying that Paperchase should have allowed itself to be bullied into apologising – on the back of a derisory 250 facebook comments and 150 direct tweets – to internet trolls orchestrated by a small group of hard left Corbynist individuals seeking to suppress legitimate debate and impose their views on the media...It is one of the fundamental principles of free and fearless journalism that editorial decisions are not dictated by advertisers."

Kath Viner in the Guardian: "The transition from print to digital did not initially change the basic business model for many news organisations – that is, selling advertisements to fund the journalism delivered to readers. For a time, it seemed that the potentially vast scale of an online audience might compensate for the decline in print readers and advertisers. But this business model is currently collapsing, as Facebook and Google swallow digital advertising; as a result, the digital journalism produced by many news organisations has become less and less meaningful. Publishers that are funded by algorithmic ads are locked in a race to the bottom in pursuit of any audience they can find – desperately binge-publishing without checking facts, pushing out the most shrill and most extreme stories to boost clicks. But even this huge scale can no longer secure enough revenue."

Anna Soubry MP on BBC Radio 4 said she had 13 death threats after featuring on the Telegraph's 'Mutineers' front page: "If the Telegraph had not printed that headline those death threats would not have come through - that is a fact."

Telegraph editor Chris Evans in a tweet to the BBC: "I’d urge you to distinguish between the legitimate actions and language of a free press and the illegitimate actions and language of those who make threats of violence."

Peter Preston in the Observer: "There once was a time when the Telegraph gave readers a unique insight of the manners, preoccupations and mindset of the Conservative party. No more. Now, seemingly, it’s a bludgeon seeking to impose uniformity in the distant, disconnected name of the brothers Barclay."

Meryl Streep at the International Press Freedom Awards: "Thank you, you intrepid, underpaid, overextended, trolled and un-extolled, young and old, battered and bold, bought and sold, hyper alert, crack caffeine fiends...chocolate-comforted Twitter clickers. You’re the enemy of the people, yeah, just the bad people."

[£]=paywall