Media Quotes of the Week: Sunday Mirror rent boys splash accounts for Keith Vaz to Brexit means more expensive newspapers as newsprint rises

MP Keith Vaz on Sunday Mirror revelations about his private life, in a statement to BBC News:"It is deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to have acted in this way."

Daily Mail in a leader: "To the public, isn’t it infinitely more troubling that the politician in charge of scrutinising policy on drugs and the vice trade – not to mention the police – is himself up to his eyes in sleaze?"

The Telegraph in a leader: "This newspaper has argued over many years that MPs sadly cannot be trusted to police their own conduct, calling instead for independent oversight, perhaps from a body similar to the US Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent watchdog solely composed of non-politicians. Mr Vaz is living proof of why politicians cannot be trusted to regulate themselves."

Keith Vaz in a statement on his resignation as chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee: "Those who hold others to account, must themselves be accountable."

Anthony Loyd in The Times [£]:"It was with some surprise watching a video of a victorious band of western-backed rebels that I noticed the face of America’s newest ally in the war against Isis in Syria. It was the face of a man I last saw in May 2014 when he leant forward to shoot me twice in the left ankle at almost point-blank range while my hands were tied. It was punishment for having attempted to escape his gang of kidnappers in northern Syria who had hoped to sell me on. He shot me in the middle of a crowd of onlookers, after a savage preliminary beating, denouncing me as 'a CIA spy'. Now, it seems, he works with them."

Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Joanna Coles, who is leaving to become Hearst's first content officer, in an interview with the New York Times: “I love Cosmo, but I gave it everything I had. I just didn’t have another sex position in me.”

Kenny Farquharson in The Times Scotland [£]: "I have reason to be wary of office awaydays. An old editor of mine once whisked his senior staff to a nice hotel in Troon for a two-day brainstorming session. Drink was taken. Harsh words were spoken. And the hotel burnt down in the middle of the night. An electrical fault, you understand. Nothing to do with us. We all just stood on the lawn in our jammies watching the hotel burn. I can’t recall many bright ideas being generated on that trip but for some time afterwards the atmosphere in the office was a little tense."

Paul Waugh on the Huffington Post: "It wasn’t an easy start to the summit for May, with Obama stressing his priorities are a trans-pacific and US-EU trade deal before any UK-US deal. There was a lovely moment in the presser where the Mail’s Jason Groves asked the Prez if he regretted making his ‘back of the queue’ threat, “or are you really going to punish us for taking a democratic decision?” Obama said 'That’s quite an editorial question…' Quick as a flash, and to laughter, Groves explained, deadpan: 'I work for the Daily Mail'."

Nick Clegg in the Guardian: “The more I governed with Gove and his team, the more I realised he was just striking a series of superficial poses. You’ve got a generation of politicians very close to the media, people like Boris Johnson and Gove, and the problem is, the skill of tossing off 800 words on one subject and then on another a week later is completely different to governing."

Wall Street Journal publisher and Dow Jones ceo Will Lewis, speaking at the NewsMediaWorks Future Forum in Sydney, as reported by Mumbrella: “When it comes to consuming the content that matters, people will choose healthy eating over digital junk food. Trust and confidence in our journalism, I think, is now winning. The appetite for quality journalism is as keen as ever. It is perhaps even keener as audiences find that the fare slopped out by the new entrants and aggregators pumped up on steroid-like venture capital funding isn’t quite to their taste...Journalist freedom, rather than journalism for free is what we should all be about.”

Will Lewis, again speaking at the NewsMediaWorks Future Forum, describes the Independent since it dumped its print edition: "A pitiful graveyard of a website”.

The NUJ in a statement: "Newsquest has put its entire south London newsroom on notice of redundancy, bar the managing editor and the web editor. The company has told its employees that four reporters, two content editors, three subeditors, an editorial assistant and the deputy managing editor will all be cut by mid-October. The remaining staff of 12 reporters and four content editors will be expected to continue to produce 11 newspapers and eight associated websites. The reporters will be expected cover all features, sport and leisure and well as news."

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Giles Coren in The Times [£] has an idea for a new magazine aimed at people his age: "If you are going to try to differentiate between us readers on the basis of age and cater for specific groups based on birthdate alone, then at least do it properly. Give me a newspaper for people of 47. And call it 47 so that I don’t get confused. It’ll be brilliant. Each week I will expect 47 to look at the big stories in news, sport, business and the wider culture and ask how they affect people of EXACTLY 47."

Daily Mail in a retraction: "To the extent that anything in the Daily Mail's article was interpreted as stating or suggesting that Mrs. Trump worked as an 'escort' or in the 'sex business,' that she had a 'composite or presentation card for the sex business,' or that either of the modeling agencies referenced in the article were engaged in these businesses, it is hereby retracted, and the Daily Mail newspaper regrets any such misinterpretation. The Daily Mail newspaper and MailOnline/DailyMail.com have entirely separate editors and journalistic teams."

Oliver Duff, editor of the i, in a letter to readers: "I’m sorry to write to you with unwelcome news. I wanted to let you know that next week, on Monday, the cover price of i will rise by 10p, to 50p...The cost of newsprint alone is increasing by 8 to 12 per cent because of the Brexit fall in the pound, a considerable annualised sum for all publishers."

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Media Quotes of the Week: From police vs press battle rages on to Alan Rusbridger stands down

Keith Vaz MP, chair of the the Home Affairs Select Committee: "RIPA is not fit for purpose. We were astonished that law enforcement agencies failed to routinely record the professions of individuals who have had their communications data accessed under the legislation. Using RIPA to access telephone records of journalists is wrong and this practice must cease. The inevitable consequence is that this deters whistleblowers from coming forward."

Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary: "The NUJ welcomes the Home Affairs Select Committee report and agrees that RIPA is not fit for purpose but we are urging political leaders and the Interception of Communications Commissioner to go further and agree there must be judicial oversight before journalists' records and data can be obtained by the police and other authorities."

Press Gazette: "A new draft Code of Practice on government spying powers has finally been published and states that police should continue to access journalists’ phone records without any outside approval. Not only does it make clear that police forces can continue to sign off their own RIPA requests for journalists' telecoms data, but it emphasises that such records are not privileged. The new code merely requires police forces to make a note of the fact they have accessed a journalists’ phone records."

Daily Mail: "The Home Office was embroiled in a fresh row over Press freedom last night after sneaking out proposals that would still allow police to sign off their own snooping into journalists’ phone records."

Lord Black of Brentwood in a letter to the Home Secretary requesting changes to the primary legislation to safeguard journalistic sources: “The industry is united in its concern about the threat to journalism, journalists themselves and to their sources from unwarranted use of state surveillance and enforcement powers. RIPA, counter terrorism and public order legislation are particularly open to abuse. These draconian legislative powers are being used without proper regard to the protection of freedom of expression and press freedom, an intrinsic part of which is the fundamental principle of protection of sources.”

Sun managing editor Stig Abell @StigAbell on Twitter: "Sun runs good story about MP playing Candy Crush. Parliamentary response: hunt the whistleblower. What is wrong with these people?"


The Sun in an editorial: "This is Britain since the Leveson Inquiry, that declaration of war on the Press by the elite we are here to hold to account. Leveson’s biased witch-hunt empowered them to try to stop the Press revealing inconvenient truths the public has a right to know.  One MP playing Candy Crush isn’t the biggest scandal ever — and we welcome that Mr Mills had the good grace to own up and swiftly apologise. The authorities’ reaction, though, is of graver significance."

James Harding, BBC director, news and current affairs, on the BBC blog: "The BBC’s job is to keep reporting and analysing the news, questioning politicians, investigating the issues, and pressing for the real story. The election campaign has begun. The BBC will, undeterred, do its job. A meek BBC wouldn’t be fulfilling its role for the public.

The Guardian in an editorial: "In an era of digital revolution, the future shape of the BBC is of huge importance to every British citizen and its audience overseas. Narrow political squabbles must not be allowed to interfere with a mature discussion of what the BBC brings to Britain and its civic life."

The Sunday Times in an editorial [£]: "Do we need a reimagining of the role of the state? Yes, we do. And we need more imagination and realism in thinking about these things. As Mr Blair put it in another context, the talents of the British people need to be liberated “from the forces of conservatism” in Labour — and the BBC."

Roy Greenslade on his Media Guardian blog: "The very fact that a title has been around for more than a century and has archives containing the intimate records of cities, towns and communities stretching back several generations is no longer a selling point. It’s history. It’s not tomorrow."

Grey Cardigan on The Spin Alley: "I keep hearing a suggestion that some kind of subsidy or central funding of the local press might be a good idea. Frankly, that’s bollocks. The fat cats in charge would just run off with the cash and continue to leave local papers under-staffed and under-resourced. And what would happen if one of these government-funded newspapers managed to upset the government – as we all should be striving to do on a daily basis? You could see that grant suddenly disappearing faster than any remaining talent at the Daily Telegraph."

Alan Rusbridger announcing his retirement after 20 years as editor of the Guardian: “It’s been quite an extraordinary period in the life of the Guardian. In February 1995 newspaper websites were, if they existed at all, exotic things: we were still four years off launching Guardian Unlimited. Since 1999 we’ve grown to overtake all others to become the most-read serious English language digital newspaper in the world."

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Media Quotes of the Week: From Tony Parsons' progress to a little bit of spin from PR Week

Tony Parsons on leaving the Mirror after 18 years: "I am going now but I wish nothing but the best to this great old newspaper, to my brilliant colleagues who remain and – above all – to you, dear, beloved Daily Mirror reader.You see, I know you, and I have known you all my life. You are the family that raised me.You are the hearts who loved me.You are the sharp, ­questioning minds who put books into my hands and taught me to look at the stars. You are the faces who looked at me across the breakfast tables of my childhood and said 'Haven’t you finished with that paper yet?' It has been a privilege, a joy and an honour."

Tony Parsons on joining the Sun Sunday, as quoted by Press Gazette: "Every footballer wants to play for Real Madrid, every actor wants to work in Hollywood. And any journalist who truly wants to reach millions of the British public wants a column in The Sun."

Sean O'Neill ‏@TimesCrime on Twitter: "Frost-Nixon interviews described on BBC today as one of greatest exclusives ever. Frost PAID Nixon. Tis a wonder Op Elveden didn't nick him." 

Chris Oakley warns in the updated edition of What Do We Mean By Local? of a "Kafkaesque nightmare vision – citizens with no local pub, no local post office, no local newspaper, no knowledge, no informed opinion on anything that should matter to them or their families.  Times are always changing, but if good men and women - and good journalists - can do nothing then change can destroy rather than create progress."

Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, quoted in the Guardian: "The protection of national security secrets must never be used as an excuse to intimidate the press into silence and backing off from its crucial work in the clarification of human rights violations."

Grey Cardigan on The Spin Alley: "BBC director general Tony Hall announces with a smirk of self-satisfaction that half of regional breakfast show hosts will be female by the end of 2014. Why? Is he saying that half the men currently doing the job aren’t up to scratch? And, if so, why haven’t local managers done something about it and sacked the useless sods?  Or is he saying that perfectly capable presenters are going to be turfed out of a job just to meet some artificial quota? Either way, the employment lawyers must be rubbing their hands with glee, the money-grabbing bastards."

Keith Vaz, chairman of the home Affairs Select Committee, quoted by the Daily Mail says the Serious Organised Crime Agency should identify the organisations who were clients of corrupt investigators: "We give you until Monday to publish this list, if you fail to publish it on Monday, we will publish it because we think it is in the public interest to do so. We’ve taken legal advice." 

Unemployed Hack on his blog takes aim at professional trolls: "A lack of principle and no journalism ethics means they’ll produce right-wing shite for The Sun and less right-wing shite for The Guardian so long as the money goes in the bank. These trolls,of course, exist alongside the lesser 'celebrity' hacks but together they create a predominantly white, middle class, myopic clique of London-based writers who condemn, judge and make a mockery of our lives and our journalism. It’s a nasty trend that sees columnists paid to share their ill-informed views – sometimes with intent to cause offense -  while investigative journalism falls by the wayside and real journalists struggle to to find freelance or staff jobs."

PR Week puts a bit of spin on the news it's going from weekly to monthly publication: "The communication industry's leading title PRWeek is preparing the biggest overhaul in its 25-year history with the launch of a monthly magazine and a series of digital products next month."