Media Quotes of the Week: From First Amendment allows press to publish Trump tax story to would a young Harry Evans rise to a top editorship today?

New York Times editor Dean Baquet on the paper's investigation into President Trump's tax affairs: "We are publishing this report because we believe citizens should understand as much as possible about their leaders and representatives — their priorities, their experiences and also their finances...Some will raise questions about publishing the president’s personal tax information. But the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment allows the press to publish newsworthy information that was legally obtained by reporters even when those in power fight to keep it hidden. That powerful principle of the First Amendment applies here."

David Corn on Twitter: "To all those newspapers with headlines proclaiming the debate was chaotic and disorderly without tying that to Trump: If a man runs into a house, throws gasoline everywhere, and lights a match, the headline should be 'Arsonist Attacks Home,' not 'Fire Breaks Out'."

Andrew Neil quoted by the Financial Times on the planned GB News 24-hour television channel which he will chair and also present programmes: “GB News is the most exciting thing to happen in British television news for more than 20 years. We will champion robust, balanced debate and a range of perspectives on the issues that affect everyone in the UK, not just those living in the London area.”

Andrew Neil on Twitter: "With heavy heart I announce I will be leaving the BBC. Despite sterling efforts by new DG to come up with other programming opportunities, it could not quite repair damage done when Andrew Neil Show cancelled early summer + Politics Live taken off air. They were/are the best of the best. If they can make me look good, they can make anybody look good. There could have been a different outcome but for reasons too dull to adumbrate, we’ll leave it there. I wish the BBC and the new DG well. The BBC will always be special to me."

MP Steve Baker interviewed by Sophy Ridge on Sky News welcoming reports that Charles Moore may be appointed chair of the BBC and Paul Dacre head of Ofcom: “They are conservatives and they might actually start to look at the way the media functions and ensure there is some impartiality.”

David Dimbleby interviewed in The Times [£]: “I’m a broadcaster, not a bureaucrat. The BBC’s morale is always at an all-time low, it’s always looking at its navel. I am very dismayed by the [Boris] Johnson attacks on the institution. I think they are crowd-pleasing; I think they are quite dangerous; I don’t think they will work...I’ve had him on Question Time a couple of times, way back. He was an entertainer, you don’t really know what he is getting at most of the time, he just blathers.”

Rod Liddle in The Spectator: "In the light of recent articles in The Spectator, I think it vital I should point out here and now that I thought Boris Johnson was crap long before Toby Young and our editor, Fraser Nelson, did. I remember suggesting more than a year ago that the entire Johnson clan was a bit thick and borne aloft simply by depthless ambition and droit de seigneur. I felt a bit bad about it because Boris was a former boss and also a kind of mate. But you have to be ruthless in this job, get in quick with your bludgeon, even if its your own granny on the end of it."

Reuters Institute report on how local and regional news organisations across Europe have embraced the shift to paid content online: "In the last two years, all of the case newspapers have shifted from digital strategies emphasising the pursuit of audience reach, monetised through advertising or a blend of paid-content models and auxiliary sources, to a focus on building lasting relationships with readers who will pay for online content in the form of subscriptions, memberships, access to premium articles, donations, or micropayments."

World News Day 2020 — which took place on Monday [September 28] — aimed: "To raise awareness of the critical role that journalists play in providing credible and reliable news, to help people make sense of — and improve — the rapidly changing world around them. At a time when journalism has the power to save lives and build trust, World News Day is a powerful reminder that journalism can be a force for good."

Alan Rusbridger in the Guardian on Sir Harold Evans: "He could do it all. Write like a dream; design with impact; edit with flair; dash off the perfect headline; crop a picture; see off a writ. There was no one who knew more about the craft of journalism, nor anyone to match his passion for communicating that craft – documented in numerous textbooks that were, in turn, studied by generations of would-be journalists...He knew why journalism mattered. He gave journalism a good name. He reminded us why we wanted to be journalists and what, at its best, journalism could – and should – be. None of us should forget that."

Former Northern Echo editor Peter Barron on Twitter: “Once picked up Sir Harold Evans from #Darlington railway station during one of his visits back to the North-East. As a newly-appointed editor of @TheNorthernEcho I asked what advice he'd give me. 'Take no notice of the ******* bean counters,' came the reply."

Stephen O’Loughlin in a letter to The Times [£]: "Sir, One wonders if Sir Harold Evans’s rise from leaving school in Eccles at 16 to becoming editor of The Sunday Times could be replicated today. One doubts it: in particular the growth of internships, and their seminal place in a modern career path, puts working-class children, such as he was, at a distinct disadvantage."

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Media Quotes of the Week: From Trump's media ban to is the Telegraph becoming the Faragegraph? and sacked Leicester City manager thanks journalists who reported football's greatest story

New York Daily News reports: "The White House ramped up its war against the press Friday, barring multiple outlets including the Daily News from asking questions of press secretary Sean Spicer.
The move came just hours after President Trump promised to 'do something' about the 'fake news' during a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference."

Committee to Protect Journalists executive director Joel Simon in the New York Times: "The unrelenting attacks on the news media damage American democracy. They appear to be part of a deliberate strategy to undermine public confidence and trust by sowing confusion and uncertainty about what is true. But they do even greater damage outside the United States, where America’s standing as a global beacon of press freedom is being drastically eroded. This is not just a matter of United States prestige. At a time when journalists around the world are being killed and imprisoned in record numbers, Mr. Trump’s relentless tirades against 'fake news' are emboldening autocrats and depriving threatened and endangered journalists of one of their strongest supporters — the United States government."

Brian Klaas on Twitter: "Attacking accurate, well-sourced press as an "enemy of the American people" while blocking critical press is unacceptable in a democracy...This is clearly a deliberate strategy and one that endangers American democracy. A free press is absolutely crucial."

Donald J. Trump on Twitter:"FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn't tell the truth. A great danger to our country. The failing @nytimes has become a joke. Likewise @CNN. Sad!

Steve Bannon at CPAC 17, quoted by the Guardian: “The corporatist, globalist media are adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda that Donald Trump has.”

Piers Morgan in the Mail on Sunday: "It’s not easy right now being someone who works in the entertainment industry that doesn’t profess to loathe and detest Donald Trump. My old friend’s victory in the US presidential election has turned Hillary-adoring Planet Showbiz into a seething cesspit of bilious hatred towards him and anyone, like me, who dares defend him in any way."

Bonnie Greer in The New European on Piers Morgan: "Morgan has become ‘the Explainer of Trump’, his Representative on Earth, the Snow White to Nigel Farage’s Rose Red. That’s his right and his business. But it has consequences. That’s because Trump is also the man who – among many things he does – calls the press 'The enemy of the people'. And that’s where Piers Morgan comes a cropper to me... and, it turns out, to many. He’s Trump’s shill. Trump, the guy who hates journalists."

Nigel Farage interviewed on Piers Morgan's Life Stories on ITV: "Will I ever forgive the British media for what they've done to me? No."

UKIP MP Douglas Carswell in an email to Lord Pearson apparently mocking a suggested knighthood for Nigel Farage, leaked to the Telegraph: “Perhaps we might try angling to get Nigel an OBE next time round? For services to headline writers? An MBE, maybe?”

Mark Wallace on Conservative Home: "Farage is a perfect fit for that wider and distinctive worldview that the Telegraph is carving out for itself. He not only shares its support for Brexit, but articulates plenty of its other opinions, too. From his tone to his real ale, he hits a certain cultural sweet spot for the paper – and his anti-politics theme of course sits well in the pages which exposed the MPs’ expenses scandal. He is an avatar for much of what it wants and feels, the closest thing yet discovered to the newspaper made flesh... it isn’t so surprising to see the emergence of The Daily Faragegraph – for the man and the newspaper alike it makes good sense."

Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell on Labour Briefing: “We have to alert party members and supporters that the soft coup is underway,” McDonnell wrote. It’s planned, co-ordinated and fully resourced. It is being perpetrated by an alliance between elements in the Labour Party and the Murdoch media empire, both intent on destroying Jeremy Corbyn and all that he stands for.”

Sir Harold Evans, quoted by the Guardian: “In terms of truth of journalism it is a very perilous time. We have those people who don’t have the brains to distinguish facts [from fiction]. Then we have the bad performers in the press, particularly numerous in the UK … Then you have got the assault [on the media].”

NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet in a statement backing recommendations on press regulation from the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee: "The NUJ’s position, now supported by the parliamentary committee, has been to call for partial implementation of Section 40. In our view, publications who have signed up to a system which facilitates cheap and accessible arbitration can only be a good thing. The punitive elements of Section 40, however, must be held back. It is untenable for any newspaper or magazine to face bearing both sides’ costs when vexatious litigants initiate action."

The Society of Editors in a statement: "The Society remains opposed to the commencement of Section 40 and, alongside other media organisations and members of the public, recognise that the legislation would have a chilling effect on both national and regional and local newspapers."

Pic: Getty Images

Claudio Ranieri, after being sacked by Leicester City, in a statement reported by@PAdugout on Twitter: "Thank you to all the journalists and the media who came with us and enjoyed reporting on the greatest story in football."

Sir Harry Evans rounds on the critics of Leveson: Accuses the press of being cynical and arrogant

Sir Harry Evans (top), the distinguished former editor of the The Times and Sunday Times, used the annual Hugh Cudlipp Lecture last night to launch a ferocious attack on the critics of the Leveson Report and their opposition to statutory underpinning of press regulation.

He damned much of the British press reaction to Leveson as showing cynicism and arrogance and accused it of misrepresenting the report's main proposal.

Sir Harry, speaking at the London College of Communication, asked: "Is there something about the ownership, tradition, structure and  personnel of the British press that breeds a unique recidivism in  which we seem doomed to experience what the economists call a negative multiplier effect – every reform provoked by some abuse is  followed by still grosser offences and, if we are to believe the defenders of the status quo, by still more extreme reformist assaults on the sacred freedom of the press bequeathed to us from time immemorial etc. Milton! Locke! Wilkes! Mill!

"Have ever those who recruit you to their cause more reminded us of  Queen Gertrude: they doth protest too much, methinks. Twenty years ago  when from my American experience I was arguing here for a Freedom of  Information Act, I was asked, reasonably enough, freedom for what?

"Freedom for exposing the records of a mental health therapist? Freedom for the clandestine taping of calls, the toxic seed of hacking yet to be fertilised by technology? Freedom to trespass in hospital wards?  Freedom to ridicule a Minister because she has put on weight? Freedom to corrupt the police? Freedom to snoop on children at school? Freedom to blackmail and bribe?

He argued: "Freedom of the press – importantly to inquire as well as to utter in the public interest – is too great a cause, too universal a value to a civilised society, to be cheapened as it is in the current debates."

Sir Harry said upwards of 100 journalists are killed each year in the name of the freedom of the press and contrasted their sacrifice with the "sleaze merchants" whose culture was "rotten, corrupt, bullying, mean and cynical, inured to the misery caused by their intrusions, contemptuous of ‘do-gooder’ press codes.

"They betrayed the ideals and principles that have animated generations of journalists – but they felt they were above the law."

He added: "As depressing as exposure of the dark arts has been, it is deepened by the cynicism and arrogance of much of the reaction to Leveson, coming from figures in the press who did nothing to penetrate - indeed whose inertia assisted - the cover-up conducted into oblivion by News International, a cover up which would have  continued, but for the skill of Nick Davies and the courage of his editor."

Sir Harry hit out at the way the Leveson Reort had been covered by the press. "The misrepresentation of Leveson’s main proposal is staggering. To portray his careful construct for statutory underpinning as state control is a gross distortion."

He said he regarded Leveson's proposals on statutory underpinning of press regulation as "an opportunity not a threat."

Sir Harry argued that the Leveson Report shows a way to protect privacy and encourage high standards while enlarging,  not diminishing, the freedom of the press.

He said: "Lord Leveson did not propose that a law should be passed laying down  how the press should behave with civil servants as censors. Did not. Did not.

"He entirely accepted that it should regulate itself through a Trust, though with independent opinion dominant.  He more or less accepted the architecture proposed by the press but wanted a surveyor to check that its foundations were stable.

"Let me emphasise: he sees regulation of the press organised by the press, but with a statutory process to ensure that the required levels of independence and effectiveness are met."

Sir Harry did have some criticisms of Leveson and said he thought it was "soft" on the police.

Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors, responded to the speech by telling Sir Harry: "The problem is we don't have the protection of a written constitution."

He said politicians could amend any proclamation supporting press freedom with a "but" and asked: "Can we trust politicians of the future? That's why we don't like it."