Thursday 6 August 2020

Media Quotes of the Week: From why the press can't risk naming MP to how to startle people: tell them the average salary for a UK journalist



The Times [£] in a leader: "The Times has decided for now not to name the MP in the latest investigation because the risks created by this recent case law are too high. Yet the reality is that the pendulum has swung too far in favour of privacy, with potentially chilling consequences. Not naming suspects makes it less likely that other victims in cases such as this will come forward and thereby increase the prospects of a conviction. It also makes it harder to investigate the actions of the police, not least in cases of wrongful arrest. The public can tell the difference between allegations and a conviction. The law should beware creating a means by which the rich and powerful can shield themselves from scrutiny and censure."


Alan Rusbridger on Twitter: "If true, this is the return of the press baron - a species that appeared to have died out with Lord [Conrad] Black, (later jailed.) That feels like a backward step in so many ways. And Claire Fox in the House of Lords. This must be a cunning Dominic Cummings plan to so discredit a British institution that it implodes."
  • Michael Crick on Twitter: "And the fact that Downing Street regularly announces these peerage lists on a Friday afternoon in the summer recess suggests they know they’re up to no good, and that it will get a lot less media scrutiny."

James Murdoch, in a letter of resignation from the board of News Corp., as reported by the Hollywood Reporter: "My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions."
  • David Yelland on Twitter: "James Murdoch’s courage to be himself, to make that stand, can only be applauded. He is his own man now; he has lost a job title but gained his freedom."
  • Les Hinton on Twitter: "Oh how he suffered for all those years and all those billions."

Kelvin MacKenzie in The Spectator on Rupert Murdoch: "Today Rupert’s British empire is not what it was. The Sun is losing £30 million a year and its sales are so low they have decided not to release the figures. In my day, it was four million; today it’s around 800,000. Very sad. My advice: the working class won’t buy a woking-class paper. All journalists should be thankful Murdoch invested here. He has kept literally thousands in work for decades. And in the case of the Times, has lost more than a billion in his 40-plus years of ownership.You should judge him by his enemies. Watson, Mosley, Grant. Enough said."


Jonathan Swan in his AXIOS interview with Donald Trump:  “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”
Trump: “You can’t do that.” Swan: “Why can’t I do that?”


Daniel Finkelstein on Twitter: "I should emphasise that my problem with the Wiley article in @TheVoicenews is not so much the fact they interviewed him - which is questionable but an editor could justify - it is the content of the interview, and the interviewers reflections which are truly truly shocking."

Sajid Javid MP on Twitter: “You would think that The Voice — of all newspapers — would’ve avoided providing a sympathetic platform for a racist. Very poor judgement.”


Owen Jones on Twitter after the Guardian mixed up pictures of Kano and Wiley to illustrate his column: "Newspapers work on tight deadlines. Columnists generally don't get to see the headline, let alone the image used. If we all did, the process would grind to a halt, especially given we don't work from the office...Kano aI have never heard of any columnist being given approval over the image used with their columns in advance. That's never happened once in the near decade I've worked for newspapers, and I had absolutely nothing to do with what happened yesterday whatsoever."
  • Piers Morgan on Twitter: "This isn’t true. I never let any column go to print or appear online without reviewing it first, including all pix. Precisely for this reason."

Guardian media editor Jim Waterson on Twitter: "What's happening with cuts at Mirror/Express/Star*Mirror/Express will have identical weekend magazines with different covers *Same content increasingly shared by all three papers *Direction of travel? Star reporters expected to do 10 stories a day with 3hrs/week for 'exclusives'."


Charlotte Tobitt on Press Gazette: "Google and Facebook could be fined millions of dollars by the Australian Government if they do not comply with a proposed code that would force them to pay news publishers for their content. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has published a first-of-its-kind draft code of conduct, which it said aims at 'addressing acute bargaining power imbalances between Australian news businesses and Google and Facebook'. The code will force the tech giants to negotiate with a news business – or a group of them banded together – and if they cannot agree a deal within three months then an independent arbitrator will decide which offer is most reasonable."


WalesOnline rugby correspondent Simon Thomas on Twitter: "The average salary for a journalist in the UK is £24,300. I like to startle folk with that fact from time to time. It always surprises people. But then what do you expect when just about everyone reads my work for free and when scores of journalism/media students are graduating each year, meaning supply exceeds demand, keeping wages down?"

Jon Coles on Twitter: "16k for a graduate starting salary on a local newspaper, with little hope of getting much more than that for several years: it makes me wonder why youngsters bother. As the senior writer on a local paper, I speak from some experience."

 [£]=paywall

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