Thursday, 11 October 2018

Media Quotes of the Week: From Strictly snog blows climate change off front page to local council secrecy stops journalists being watchdog for public



Alan Rusbridger @arusbridger on Twitter: "Most UK papers think a drunken snog at Strictly is the most important story today. More important than a terrifying new #IPCC report saying we have 12 years to stave off the catastrophic effects of global warming."



The Committee to Protect Journalists' European Union representative Tom Gibson in a statement on the murder of Bulgarian journalist Victoria Marinova: "CPJ is shocked by the barbaric murder of journalist Victoria Marinova. Bulgarian authorities must employ all efforts and resources to carry out an exhaustive inquiry and bring to justice those responsible."


The Committee to Protect Journalists' deputy executive director Robert Mahoney on the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi: "CPJ is alarmed by media reports that Jamal Khashoggi may have been killed inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. The Saudi authorities must immediately give a full and credible accounting of what happened to Khashoggi inside its diplomatic mission. The country has stepped up its repression of critical journalists in the past year at home. We hope this has not now spread abroad."


The Guardian in a leader: "Without sustained pressure – including for independent or joint investigations, should domestic ones fall short – those responsible for journalists’ deaths will go unpunished, and more journalists will die."


Lionel Barber  on Twitter: "The murderous attacks on journalists are becoming ever more prevalent. When an American president regularly denounces the media as “enemies of the people” it is hardly a surprise when less savoury regimes regard reporters and broadcasters as fair game."


BBC director general Tony Hall, giving the inaugural Society of Editors Bob Satchwell lecture: “People who try to undermine the BBC’s reputation for their own political ends should be careful what they wish for. Nobody wants to end up in the highly polarised, almost separate, political and media cultures we see across the Atlantic. Nor the monocultural landscape of state-run media in some other countries."


Adam Barnett on politics.co.uk: "So far from improving on the media's factual errors and political bias, outlets like the Canary seem to be trying to outdo them on falsehood and partisanship, with a few sinister quirks added in...These sites are not a plucky alternative to the mainstream press. They are the aspirant state media for a future autocracy. If they will help governments defame journalists in other countries, and shrug when those journalists are arrested, imagine what they would do to people here who they actually know and dislike."

Jane Bradley @jane__bradley on Twitter: "Huge exclusive from the HSJ, followed up by almost every mainstream news org in the UK. Invest in good specialist journalists and give them time to burrow into their beat, it pays off."


Kyle Pope in the Columbia Journalism Review on the New York Times' 18-month investigation into the Trump family's financial affairs: "One of its great benefits, to my mind, is that it transcends the headlines of the day, focusing on an elemental, fundamental aspect of this man and this presidency that, it turns out, is even more divorced from our common understanding than we might have previously thought. It is an example of journalism as long game, a sport that more of us need to be playing."


Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian on his father, the journalist Michael Freedland, who died last week: "As fate would have it, the day after his death this newspaper carried an article written by him a few months earlier: an obituary of Charles Aznavour, who, like him, died on Monday. So Michael Freedland went out the way he would have wanted – with a byline."


Cornwall Live editor Jacqui Merrington on the BBC 1 drama Press, via HoldTheFrontPage“As a journalist, it’s impossible not to get a bit defensive about a programme painting a dark picture of an industry I know so well. And I’m not alone in feeling a bit hacked off by it...But journalism has changed beyond recognition. This programme fails to appreciate that, dragging up some of the worst elements of journalism in the 1980s and setting them in the here and now. It’s made journalists out to be arseholes, doing nothing to help restore the battered reputation of an industry I know and love. And for that, I hate it.”


The Times [£] in a leader on local government secrecy and the press: "It is not as if the problem is a recent change in the political climate. The Local Government Act of 2000 was a well-intentioned attempt to streamline decision-making at municipal level by moving from a committee-based system to an executive system. In practice it has tended to concentrate power and encourage secrecy. Nobody disputes that in granting contracts councils may have to keep some information confidential. However, our report today suggests that there is instead a culture of aggrandisement and avoidance of public accountability. The role of journalists is to be the eyes and the ears of the public and to tell voters of the decisions that are being made in their name. For that, they need access."

[£]=paywall

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