Andrew Neil in the Sunday Times [£] on how after the paper's splash on the Queen's view of Margaret Thatcher it was suggested he should resign as editor along with Palace press secretary Michael Shea: "At one stage, it was suggested that Shea would resign if I agreed to resign too. When that was knocked back, the quid pro quo was floated of me for Sir William Heseltine, the Queen’s private secretary. At least I’m now worth more than a bloody spin doctor, I thought. But still no deal.Then some of the more Establishment-minded national directors of Times Newspapers with palace connections came looking for my scalp. The proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, had to remind them their job was to protect my editorial independence, not to seek my sacking."
The Times [£] in a leader: "We report today on a unit within the Cabinet Office. Known as the freedom of information “clearing house”, it is believed to run a watchlist, or perhaps a blacklist, of journalists from publications, including this one, to identify freedom of information requests which may be deemed sensitive and then advise departments as to how best frustrate them. The same unit is believed to vet the responses from those departments. This from a government that has fought on many fronts to frustrate the workings of the press and media...If the prime minister’s promised reset is to mean anything, it should start with a commitment to far greater transparency, not least as to what the FOI clearing house is up to."
Robert Peston in The Spectator: "It is such a relief that Dominic Cummings has gone. Not for the sake of the country or the government — you can make your own mind up about that. No, no, I’m talking about me. Over the past year or so, the abuse I’ve received on Twitter and Facebook for reporting anything perceived to have originated anywhere near Cummings has been wearing. I’ve never endorsed anything he said or did."
Amal Clooney accepting the 2020 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists: "Americans voted in a new leader who can reclaim moral leadership on the world stage. They rejected the candidate who called the press enemies of the people and shrugged off the murder of a Washington Post columnist."
Marina Zolotova, the editor of Tut.by, an independent news website in Belarus, quoted in The Times [£]: “Blue press jackets and press badges have become targets. When journalists go to cover a protest they cannot be sure that they will come home. This is a real war by the authorities against independent journalism and their own people.”
Suzanne Moore on Unheard on her departure from the Guardian after the staff letter accusing her of being transphobic: "Mistakenly, I thought my editors would stand up for me because that was my experience at other papers; or they might issue a public statement. They didn’t. There was some internal email, and I hear it was discussed at the Scott Trust, which governs the paper. What this means I genuinely have no idea. Nor do I understand what editorial independence means any more. Do they? Not in my book. This to me was utter cowardice. Shouldn’t you stand by your writers? But on this issue the Guardian has run scared."
BuzzFeed founder and ceo Jonah Perettti in a statement after BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost: “I have vivid memories of growing HuffPost into a major news outlet in its early years, but BuzzFeed is making this acquisition because we believe in the future of HuffPost and the potential it has to continue to define the media landscape for years to come.”
- Emily Bell on Twitter: "BuzzFeed and HuffPost for all their issues represented prototypes of good faith digital news operations. As they consolidate, and possibly shrink a little, consider the political money currently growing bottom-feeding wildly misleading networks of local and national news."
BBC head of news gathering Jonathan Munro, quoted in The Times [£]: "We don’t want all our editorial meetings to be dominated by what white people think. We don’t want any single group in society to dominate our editorial thinking, because we are not being diverse in our thought process.”
BBC Media Centre promoting new BBC 2 three-part documentary The Fall of the House of Maxwell: "From Robert Maxwell’s beginnings as impoverished survivor of the Holocaust, via the extraordinary creation and collapse of his multimillion pound media business, his apparently accidental death and revelations of fraud on a grand scale, to the prosecution of his daughter thirty years later for her alleged involvement in grooming underage victims for sexual abuse, it’s the tale of the rise and fall of the first great modern media mogul and of the unravelling of his deeply troubled family."
Alan Rusbridger on Press Gazette: "The best editors have passion as well as calm; breadth as well as focus; nerves of steel as well as powers of empathy. They must have cool judgement and, preferably, a backbone. Most of the time it is the reporters, not the editors, who are most exposed and who are taking the most risks. The editor is there to back them and bring the institutional protection of the organisation to shield them."
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