Media Quotes of the Week : From Sun pours olive oil on Supreme Court privacy injunction ruling to when Jeremy Clarkson covered parish councils

The Sun in a leader: "HEAVEN help our judicial system if the judges who upheld the celebrity gagging order yesterday are the best it can find for the Supreme Court. Their illogical and idiotic ruling exposed them as out-of-touch old ­duffers with a predictably contemptuous snobbery towards popular papers and our millions of readers...They have sneered at tabloid readers and created a charter for cheating celebs, especially those with kids. Any caught with their pants down can use the children as a Get Out Of Jail Free card. And their pricey lawyers are already eyeing up new holiday homes in Tuscany."

Lord Mance, as the Supreme Court upholding the celebrity threesome privacy injunction against the Sun on Sunday, as reported by BBC News: "There is no public interest (however much it may be of interest to some members of the public) in publishing kiss and tell stories or criticisms of private sexual conduct, simply because the persons involved are well known; and so there is no right to invade privacy by publishing them."

The Times [£] in a leader: "The Supreme Court has come to a decision which would have been merely foolish 20 years ago. Today it is both sinister and absurd. Courts of all levels should think very carefully before allowing this sort of farce to unfold again."

Ex-MP John Hemming on his blog: “I am surprised that the Supreme Court have upheld this injunction. The logical conclusion of this is that gossip about anyone with children will become a criminal offence subject to a potential penalty of 2 years's imprisonment.  It is important to note that the injunction covers people talking in pubs, gossiping over the garden fence, or twittering on the internet. All of these could potentially see an application for committal for contempt of court. That comes with large amounts of legal costs and up to 2 years imprisonment...the Supreme Court have not learnt from the lesson of King Canute that there are realities that it is not practical to resist."

The Sun in a leader: "DOES the Queen back Brexit? We’re sure she does. But today we are having to publish a front page ruling by the Press regulator IPSO over our March 9 headline which claimed Her Majesty was for Leaving. 'Queen Backs Brexit' was qualified by another headline above it reading 'Exclusive: bombshell claim over Europe vote'. It seemed fair enough to us. Tabloid newspapers like The Sun have long made eye-catching assertions in headlines alongside a smaller headline to qualify or attribute them. It is a standard device. But IPSO decided it wasn’t right — though it had no problem with the story beneath it, about Her Majesty’s eurosceptic remarks which two impeccable sources confirmed. We stand by all of it."

David Yelland ‏@davidyelland on Twitter: "Hats off to @tonygallagher for skilled @BBCr4today defence. Headline was clearly as dodgy as some of mine."

Alan Rusbridger in an email, published by BuzzFeed, to Guardian Media Group staff explaining his reasons for no longer becoming chair of the Scott Trust: “When, in late 2014, the Scott Trust appointed me to succeed Liz as chair I was beyond honoured, But much has changed in the year since I stepped down. All newspapers – and many media organisations beyond – have been battered by turbulent and economic forces that were difficult to see last summer. I have been on the trust long enough to understand its role. We all currently do our journalism in the teeth of a force 12 digital hurricane. It is surely obvious to anyone that changed circumstances will demand dramatically changed solutions. Kath [Viner] and David [Pemsel] clearly believe they would like to plot a route into the future with a new chair and I understand their reasoning."

Ian Katzt‏@iankatz1000 on Twitter: "Whatever you think of @arusbridger becoming trust chair, v sad that his Guardian career ends like this. He did more for paper than anyone."

Michael Wolff in GQ: "In the end, the Rusbridger legacy cannot likely be undone. The brand is what there is—that’s the asset. Rusbridger had the fun part of the job, spending money like a Romanoff to create it. Now the workers have to figure out how to claw back value from it."

Croydon Advertiser reporter Gareth Davies after Met Police revoked a harassment warning against him for questioning a convicted fraudster: "I behaved as journalists across the country do on a daily basis but was issued with a warning by the police, which could have appeared on my criminal record, without officers conducting any form of investigation to establish whether the allegations were true. I'm glad that, in agreeing to write to the College of Policing, the Met and the IPCC have acknowledged that the use of PINs [Police Information Notices] in relation to journalists needs to be reviewed. As my case has demonstrated, PINs can be used to impede responsible journalism."

Philip Collins in The Times [£]: "The loudest noises in politics are now made by empty vessels who believe in systematic bias, arranged and dispensed to do down their pet cause. One side thinks “the media” is pro-EU. The other thinks it is anti-Corbyn. Presumably “the media” gets all confused when Mr Corbyn delivers a pro-EU speech, not knowing which of its establishment causes to abandon. This is the context into which John Whittingdale, the culture secretary, has dropped his BBC white paper and it is dispiriting to see, once you get past the unexciting, predictable boringness of most of it, that he doesn’t trust the BBC either."

Can Dündar, the editor of Cumhuriyet in Turkey, who is facing more than five years in prison for publishing leaked star documents,  quoted in the Guardian: “During this entire saga, it has particularly attracted my attention that the British government preferred not to utter even a single word. This should be embarrassing for the government of a country that takes pride in its democracy.”

Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian: "Those now fighting for freedom of expression around the world should perceive more support from the land of John Milton, John Stuart Mill and George Orwell."

Times in a leader [£]: "Facebook, perhaps the most visited website in the world, is suffering from an identity crisis. Around 1.65 billion people worldwide use the service every month, and media analysts estimate that 70 per cent of them rely upon it as their gateway to reading news. In keeping with other social networks, however, Facebook continues to regard itself as a platform and not as a publisher. The difference is not just semantic. A publisher, such as the one that brings you this newspaper, has a clearly defined responsibility towards its readers...The internet is global and online freedom of speech is, today, one of America’s greatest exports. Influence this vast, even so, must at least be scrutinised. Most of all, it would be far easier to defend the companies which are now the most powerful publishers in the world if they could admit, at least, that this is what they are."

Jeremy Clarkson in the Sunday Times Magazine [£]: "At school, after committing some trivial misdemeanour — hopping through the memorial garden or putting Polyfilla in all the classroom locks; I can’t remember what — I was made to write a thousand-word essay about the inside of a ping-pong ball. It was tough, but the practice was useful later, on the Rotherham Advertiser, where I was regularly made to file a report on what had happened at the previous evening’s meeting of Brinsworth parish council. That meant coming up with six or seven paragraphs about absolutely nothing at all."

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Media Quotes of the Week: From press lashes Hacked Off over Whittingdale dominatrix conspiracy theory to should hacks reveal their tax?

The Spectator blog: "Labour’s demands that Whittingdale recuses himself from the issue of press regulation is intended to develop Hacked Off’s conspiracy theory that Whittingdale has gone easy on the press because he was being blackmailed. It overlooks a crucial point, though: the Culture Secretary has no power over the press, nor does anyone else in the government. Britain’s press is free, and journalists can be as rude as they like to ministers without fear of reprisal. There is quite simply no mechanism of reprisal — because the press fought off David Cameron’s disgraceful attempt to impose press regulation."

Daily Mail in a leader: "And the Oscar for egregious hypocrisy goes to… the trouser-dropping luvvies, posturing lawyers and third-rate academics of the anti-newspaper campaign group, Hacked Off.This is the organisation, remember, founded to protect celebrities' private lives from unwarranted Press intrusion. Yet now it castigates newspapers for failing to reveal that an ex-girlfriend of John Whittingdale was a prostitute."

David Aaronovitch in The Times [£]: "In wrongly deploying against a political foe his entirely private activities, the high-minded have argued themselves into the gutter."

The Telegraph in a leader: "Surely Hacked Off should be welcoming the restraint of editors. Moreover, the most dominant force in the media nowadays is not the Press, but the BBC. Has there been a conspiracy between the corporation and Hacked Off to damage Mr Whittingdale? Perhaps Newsnight would care to investigate."

Roy Greenslade on Newsnight: "I think it is a bit much to castigate the newspapers for doing the right thing for once.'

Nick Cohen @NickCohen4 on Twitter: "Let me see if I can get this right. Hacked Off is complaining that the tabloids DIDN'T invade a politician's privacy."

The Guardian in a leader: "To pretend, in the absence of any other revelation, that a consensual adult sex life exposes a person to blackmail or makes them unfit for office is an idea whose time has gone – and good riddance."

Robert Peston on his ITV blog:"The notion that there was a conspiracy is, I think, nuts. Because it was never going to work.  If there is one thing I've learned in more than 30 years as a hack, it is that journalists can't keep a secret. They/we can't help ourselves - we gossip. So any deliberate cover up would always have failed. What is clear to me is that this story was not published because the four newspapers failed to establish that it was a story - and the vendor of the story was asking a lot of money for it, £20,000....The Sunday People was the first newspaper to be offered the story at the end of 2013. It approached Tom Watson - the Labour MP, now deputy leader of the Labour party, then a colleague of Mr Whittingdale on the Culture committee - for his advice on whether it should publish. He told them he did not see there was a public-interest reason to run the story on Mr Whittingdale's affair, since he was a single man, this was his private life, and the People had no evidence that Mr Whittingdale had paid for sex."

John Whittingdale, in a statement to Newsnight, on his past relationship with a sex worker: "At no time did she give me any indication of her real occupation and I only discovered this when I was made aware that someone was trying to sell a story about me to tabloid newspapers. As soon as I discovered, I ended the relationship. This is an old story which was a bit embarrassing at the time. The events occurred long before I took up my present position and it has never had any influence on the decisions I have made as culture secretary."

Labour's Chris Bryant on Newsnight: "It seems the press were quite deliberately holding a sword of Damocles over John Whittingdale. He has a perfect right to a private life but as soon as he knew this he should have withdrawn from all regulation of the press."

Neil Wallis ‏@neilwallis1 on Twitter: "Charles Moore (great journo, btw) confronted v elderly parents, unknowing relatives, & Justin Welby over his illegitimacy...could a tabloid?"

Daily Mail hits out at Guardian

The Daily Mail in a leader: "Enough of this madness. Instead of grovelling before the politics of envy mob, the Prime Minister should be arguing that, for most people, Inheritance Tax (IHT) — by re-taxing income that has already been taxed — is unfair. He should also be shouting from the rooftops the moral case for low taxation. Leave aside the rank hypocrisy of the BBC and the Guardian, which have led the charge over the leaked Panama papers from their moral high horses — despite their own history of adopting elaborate measures to minimise their tax liabilities."

Guardian head of media jane martinson ‏@janemartinson on Twitter: "Surprised that it took the Mail so long to back the wealthy rather than attack huge offshore industry?"

Michael Wolff in GQ: "As for Rusbridger's Guardian, in an age of low interest rates and costly internet economics, that Guardian is either a thing of the past or on a suicide mission."

Peter Barron in his farewell column after 17 years as editor of the Northern Echo:  "Local newspapers have a vital role to play in society and my parting wish is that they are given the time and support for quality, campaigning journalism that makes a difference to people’s lives. The future of local journalism cannot just be built on 'click-bait' – stories which attract the biggest number of hits online. There will be those who call me a dinosaur but if I see another 'stomach-churning compilation of the best spot-squeezing videos' on a ‘news’ website, I may well take a hammer to my computer. Exploding spots may get lots of hits, and that may attract digital advertising revenue, but it isn’t news."

Daily Mail in an editorial: "Millions of Americans will be talking about it, after a paper reported the full story. And inevitably, social media chatrooms all around the globe will be abuzz with the names.
Yet thanks to a Court of Appeal injunction, the once-free Press of the UK remains banned from revealing the identity of the celebrity married couple who flaunt their happy family lives, with the aid of expensive PRs, while one of them is said to have indulged in an extra-marital threesome. Could anything more starkly expose the law’s failure to keep up with the age of the internet, in which no judge’s ruling can stop stories from flashing round the world within seconds?

Hugo Rifkind in The Times [£]: "The most ridiculous thing about this injunction is not, as some have been arguing, that it is ineffective. In fact, it has been very effective. True, if you are elsewhere in Britain, you could learn the identity of this couple by phoning a friend in Scotland. Certainly, you could browse online and figure it out pretty quickly. Within England and Wales, however, on its own limited terms, the blackout has done the job....The attorney-general Jeremy Wright, meanwhile, has issued a statement warning ordinary British users of social media that they, too, could find themselves in contempt of court for naming names. Although without, of course, saying which names. Collectively, the country has been hushed. With menaces."

Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail on the the three-in-a-bed privacy injection: "Sadly, we can’t even tell you if the olive oil involved was virgin."

Guido Fawkes: "Guido has lots of online embarrassments soon to be discovered on the internet by his Google-savvy young children. As much as he would prefer to cover it all up, this protection would be a risky curtailment of press freedom."

Financial Times political correspondent Henry Mance on a booze filled lunch with Nigel Farage: "For me, this is now entering stag-party territory; for him, it’s little more than holy communion."

David Hepworth in InPublishing on looking what people were reading on a London tube journey:"The most read paper publication was, not surprisingly, the Metro, which is given away free. I saw one man reading The Times, another man reading the Mail and a third reading the Mirror. In each case, they were old enough to require spectacles (which is something that editors and designers should maybe take into account more than they do). I saw two people reading magazines, both of them men. One was reading The Economist, the other Retro Gamer, which was a new one on me. I didn’t see a single woman reading a magazine, which twenty years ago would have been inconceivable."

Stig Abell ‏@StigAbell, who is off to edit the Times Literary Supplement, on Twitter: "My last day at the Sun today. My leaving page is a work of utter genius."

Jeremy Corbyn asked by Andrew Marr if political journalists and newspaper editors should reveal their financial details: “I think we are moving in that direction, I think it’s probably a good thing if we move generally in that direction so everybody knows what influences are at play. I think we need to consider how far it goes, how far it goes to other people involved in public life.”

Tom Harris in the Daily Telegraph: "Government regulation of the press is a bad enough idea. Special new rules for the regulation of individual journalists and their tax affairs would take us beyond Corbyn Labour's admiration for Russian authoritarianism into weird, North Korean totalitarian territory."

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Gag of the Day: Footballer gets injunction as Telegraph says 80 gag orders granted in six years

Another married England footballer obtained a gagging order last night to keep details of his private life secret, the Daily Mail reports today.

The Mail says: "The father, who plays for a leading Premier League club, became the latest celebrity to use human rights legislation to hide details of his indiscretions with another woman from the public."

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports:"The rich and the famous have obtained almost 80 gagging orders in British courts in six years, blocking the publication of intimate details about their private lives."

It adds: "Judges are issuing privacy injunctions at an increasing rate, with a total of 18 orders granted already this year compared with just five in the whole of 2005. They have also issued 12 super-injunctions, which ban the media from referring to their existence.

"The Daily Telegraph analysed all secrecy orders and injunctions issued in the past six years, prompted by suggestions that the orders are increasingly being used by the courts to enforce a privacy law by the backdoor”.

The Daily Telegraph’s audit found:

• Nine footballers, nine actors, four pop stars, six wealthy businessmen and women, a senior civil servant and an MP have obtained injunctions;
• Just three High Court judges have granted more than a third of the injunctions between them;
• Schillings, the media law firm, has obtained more than 20 of the orders and been paid an estimated £2 million;
• One super-injunction is so binding that even the name of the judge has been kept secret. He can be referred to only as Mr Justice [xxxx];
• A raft of previously unpublished injunctions has been uncovered, including an international pop star who obtained a gagging order to prevent a former employee revealing details about her private life.

Another Premier League player gags Sun in court

The Sun reports today that a married Premier League footballer has won a gagging order banning the paper from telling of his three-month fling with a model.

It claims the player called in lawyers after "we snapped him on his doorstep giving Kim West a kiss after a night of passion."

The Sun adds: "The star was terrified of his wife's reaction after we confronted him. And the High Court granted yet another injunction, the latest in a long line covering up celebs' bed-hopping antics."

Sun goes bonkers over bonking banker ban

The Sun continues its outrage today about being banned by a judge from reporting the details of an affair by a senior executive at a bailed-out British bank with a colleague.

It claims the judge who granted a privacy gag has attacked the kind of freedom of speech that people are fighting and dying for in Libya.

In an op-ed piece, associate editor Trevor Kavanagh tells readers: "You would be furious to know why we were gagged - not because of the evidence, but because the courts did not not want you, Sun readers to see it.

"Mr. Justice Henriques swiftly swept this affair under the carpet."

Kavanagh fumes: "By censoring what is a legitimate story in the public interest, the judge himself stands in contempt of Britain's globally revered free press.

"Freedom of speech - along with a free press - is the last defence of a free people. It is what the people of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are fighting and dying for today."

Mail: Second England footballer wins injunction

Another England footballer has won a draconian injunction to gag the media from reporting revelations about his private life - the second in a week, the Daily Mail reports today.
The Mail reports: "The multi-millionaire, who cannot be named, is a father in a long-term relationship. He won the restrictive order last night banning a woman from publicising personal details about him."
A similar injunction was granted to another England international footballer last week after he discovered a Sunday tabloid was planning to run a story about his private life.
The Mail comments: "The latest example of media censorship will reignite the row over judge-made privacy laws which have never been approved by Parliament. Instead, the orders are based on judges' personal interpretation of human rights laws.
"Under the strict terms of the injunctions, neither of the footballers involved in this week’s actions can be named, despite the Daily Mail knowing who they are. Both orders were granted at the High Court in London by Mr Justice Nicol, on the grounds that the revelations would breach the footballers’ ‘right to a private and family life".
Breaching such an order could result in criminal prosecution for contempt of court.