Media Quotes of the Week: From entrapment won Allardyce nil, to Littlejohn is a Billy Bragg fan

The Telegraph in a leader after its revelations ended the career of the England football manager: "Sam Allardyce has manifestly failed to live up to the standards expected of an England manager. His willingness to engage in detailed conversations with people he believed represented wealthy foreign business interests about how to get around football’s rules show that he is not the man to champion probity and honesty in the game. It is right that he has gone."

Sam Allardyce, as reported by BBC News: "Unfortunately it was an error of judgement on my behalf. I've paid the consequences. Entrapment has won on this occasion and I have to accept that."

Daniel Taylor in the Guardian: "If you have followed Allardyce’s career, the infamous Panorama documentary and the chequered past of his agent, Mark Curtis, it is not any surprise the man the FA appointed in July was ripe for a newspaper sting. It is unusual, perhaps, that it is the Daily Telegraph having a go at playing the Fake Sheikh and there are parts of its coverage that, to be blunt, are questionable, to say the least."

FA chairman Greg Clarke interviewed in the Telegraph:  “Where you don’t have an inquisitive, free press, very dark things happen in the corners of the world, which are hidden. There is nothing wrong with using what techniques you have to use to expose wrongdoing.”

Pope Francis, meeting with Italy's national council of journalists, as reported by the Catholic News Agency: “I hope that more and more journalism everywhere is a tool of construction, a factor for the common good, an accelerator of processes of reconciliation; that it may know how to reject the temptation of stirring up confrontation, with language that fans the flames of division, instead favoring the culture of encounter.”

Nick Cohen in  The Spectator: "Corbyn has no good writers on his side. In my world of liberal journalism, everyone is saying that when talented journalists decide to support Corbyn, their talent abandons them, and they produce gushing pieces that would embarrass a lovestruck teenager."

Roy Greenslade on MediaGuardian: "No publisher, despite differing motivations, can escape the commercial effects of a technological revolution that is in the process of destroying the funding mechanism that has underpinned newspaper companies for more than 150 years. Journalists are aware of this but tend to turn a blind eye to reality. They blame publishers for the cutbacks, or at least, the way those cutbacks are carried out."

How Jeremy Paxman's father, Keith, introduced him to his golf playing friends, according to an extract from his memoir, A Life in Questions, serialised in The Times [£]: “One of those homosexual communists from the BBC”.

Kelvin MacKenzie in the Sun: "I HEAR brown-noser of the millennium Sir Craig Oliver is soon to serialise his book on his five years as Director of Communications for David Cameron at No10. Apparently it’s a dull old tome as you would expect from somebody who started out in life with a diploma in broadcasting from Cardiff School of Journalism. In the book he takes a number of pot shots at this fine organ, and is especially critical of The Sun’s pro-Brexit stand. It’s that very misunderstanding of ordinary people that explains why both Oliver and his boss are now unemployed."

Giles Coren in The Times [£] on his restaurant reviews: "I am fed up with writing elaborate, original articles that veer off at tangents. After all, where has that ever got me? Nowhere. Nothing but complaints about how I seem to think my own life and opinions are more important than the food on the plate. Henceforth, I am just going to phone it in like everyone else."

Paul Farhi in the Washington Post: "Folks, I know a lot of you don’t like the people who work in my chosen profession, the news business. I’m aware you think we’re lazy and unfair (yes, I got your emails and tweets on this topic — a few thousand of them). Of course, I disagree with you. I know a lot of fine people in the newsgathering arts and sciences. But that’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing because I have a request: Please stop calling us 'the media.' Yes, in some sense, we are the media. But not in the blunt way you use the phrase. It’s so imprecise and generic that it has lost any meaning. It’s — how would you put this? — lazy and unfair."

Jose Mourhino responds to his critics in the media, as reported by BBC Sport: “The Einsteins need money to live, they can’t coach, they can’t sit on the bench, they can’t win matches. They can speak, they can write, they can criticise the work of other people, but I am a good man. I am good man of goodwill. I do lots of charity, I help so many people, so why not also feed the Einsteins? That’s fine.”

Paul Holden who runs the Worthing Journal, quoted by HoldTheFrontPage: “If newspapers are to survive, they need to go back to basics and study publications from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, when, if the mayor sneezed, readers knew about it. Those still serving up a diet of 1980s Sun-style headlines and celebrity gossip dressed up as news have had their day.”

Richard Littlejohn in  the Mail: "Sifting through my music, you’d soon come to the conclusion that I lived in a scruffy squat in Islington, subscribed to the Guardian and had a wardrobe full of duffel coats, Guy Fawkes masks and CND badges. My collection reads like an A-Z of agitprop. For a start, I must have a dozen albums by the Left-wing singer/songwriter Billy Bragg, hero of every protest rally over the past 30 years, from the miners’ strike to Stop The War. Truth is, I’ve always been a great admirer of Bragg, aka the Bard of Barking, even though we’re not exactly politically simpatico."

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Media Quotes of the Week: From police must understand journalists are not criminals to why the Daily Mail backed release of Guantanamo prisoner

Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors on the draft Investigatory Powers Bill: “This does not appear to be much of an improvement on the interim measures that were put in place after the RIPA scandal. The police need to understand that journalists are not criminals and that they need to think very carefully before they do anything to search their records. Accessing journalists’ call records should be a rare exception for police rather that the rule it seems to have become in recent years. There also needs to be a clear rule that media organisations get fair warning so that they can challenge any requests if required.”

David Davis in the Mail on Sunday on Freedom of Information: "Government already holds all the cards. As it stands they use every trick to avoid disclosing information, even resorting to writing comments on post-it notes, so they can be removed before documentation is made public. They should not be allowed to take away one of the few defences the public has for discovering and preventing incompetence, corruption and misconduct amongst the most powerful people in the land."

The Telegraph in a leader defending Freedom of Information: "Ultimately, easy access to political information will breed a culture change. If councils know that the public are watching their spending then they will spend less, and publish full accounts that show how well they are behaving. If politicians understand that mistakes, disasters and backfiring initiatives are likely to wind up on a front page then they will be quick to correct errors, or be honest about what went wrong. If politicians recognise this change and embrace it, they can make it work for them. Transparency will help re-establish trust in British politics."

Colin Myler, interviewed in the Guardian: “We really do beat the crap out of each other too much as an industry. We’re not very good at talking each other up. How many times can people write about the decline in circulation? It’s been in decline for 50 years! The Buzzfeeds of this world have realised that piggybacking off good journalism is going be their legacy. And yet we are the founders of it, and we’re so negative.”

Paul Hayward in the Telegraph on the way sport helped him as he was treated for cancer: "Sport is my living, and a passion, too. But I understand it better now, nearly 30 years into the job. Much of the best sports writing is about the life stories that underpin the winning and losing. ‘Adversity overcome’ is a default mode for reporting and broadcasting. A corollary is that sport can help people in the most profound ways, on the field and up in the stands. It can help make sense of life and connect people in difficulty to a world they have fallen out of and to which they fear they may never return."

Jurgen Kloop on Jose Mourhino, as reported by the BBC: "I am full of respect for his work. I think if you are not a journalist or a referee he is a nice guy."

The BBC after police used special counter-terrorism powers to seize a laptop computer belonging to Newsnight reporter Secunder Kermani: “The BBC does everything it can to protect its reporters’ communication and materials and sought independent expert legal advice in the case of Secunder Kermani. It did not resist Thames Valley’s application for an order under the Terrorism Act in court because the Act does not afford grounds under which it could be opposed. It is troubling that this legislation does not provide the opportunity for the media to mount a freedom of speech defence.”

Nick Cohen in the Observer: "There are many long-established institutions we could live without. If the Times or the Home Office were to vanish tomorrow, we would survive. For all its glaring faults, the majority of people know that a diminished BBC, like a diminished NHS, would diminish them. The majority of people don’t set policy, however. In times of crisis, the activists with simple, sweeping solutions take over. Whether they are English nationalists, who want independence from Brussels, Scottish nationalists, who want independence from London, rightwingers, who hate the public sector or leftwingers who hate liberal freedoms, they all want to see the BBC beaten into submission."

The Times [£] in a leader after the conviction of Mark Dorling was referred to the Court of Appeal following a Times investigation: "The initial verdict will in due course be examined by the appropriate judicial authority. Whatever the appellate court decides, this outcome is as it should be in a functioning democracy. As and when the formal, constitutionally orthodox and — some might argue — more respectable branches of the state fall short, the fourth estate has a duty to step in."

Alan Bennett, interviewed in the Guardian: “The lies on the front page of the Mail are so vulgar and glaring. Occasionally people say they like my work and then I see they have a copy of the Mail, and you think, ‘Well, how can you?’”

The Daily Mail in a leader: "This paper is proud of the leading role we played in securing the return home of the last British resident in Guantanamo Bay after his 14 years’ captivity. For the release of Shaker Aamer begins what we hope will be the end of a truly shameful period in our history, when a Labour Government colluded with the Americans in torturing suspects and incarcerating them without trial, in inhuman conditions, for years on end. Yes, many have asked why a paper that abhors Islamist terrorism has campaigned so tenaciously to free a man suspected of close links with Osama bin Laden. Our answer is simple. Though we hold no brief for Mr Aamer, who may indeed have been an enemy of the West (and could still be), we believe with a burning passion in justice and the rule of law."

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