Media Quotes of the Week: Is chasing Channel migrants essential reporting or nauseating? to Guardian is racist about me claims Lebedev

Tim Walker on Twitter: "The spectacle of rich privileged white people interrogating small groups of desperate people of colour in overcrowded dinghies from their large yachts is becoming nauseating. This is not journalism. It is mindless rabble-rousing."

Thais Portilho on Twitter: "Genuinely don’t understand complaints about journalists reporting from the English Channel. I much prefer to see what’s happening. They’re documenting the conditions in which migrants are making the crossing and the way authorities handle the situation. Essential reporting. It may feel voyeuristic, but journalists are the eyes and ears of the public. They’re documenting the crossing and the way migrants are treated when approached by the authorities. When they’re out there, we can see what’s happening. They’re not there for fun."

David Yelland on Twitter: "Brexit editors, knowing that being a Remainer meant a career cul-de-sac, colluded to con their readers. Already the trade issue and now migrant crisis show they lied to the country. Brexit is a disaster. Always was. What a scandal this is....."

Sir Bernard Ingham in the Yorkshire Post on plans to appoint a Government spokesman giving daily televised White House-style media briefings: "The post is a constitutional outrage even if we have been subjected to televised briefings since the onset of coronavirus. It is a further ill-considered undermining of our Parliamentary democracy. And Parliament will be for ever damned if it permits this further step down the road to US-style presidential government...at its heart is the malevolent presence of Dominic Cummings, the PM’s principal adviser, who thinks the Civil Service is pretty useless and the machine would be in the better hands of weirdos like himself."

Nick Cohen in the Observer: "The trouble with having a government run by second-rate Tory journalists is that it cares more about bad headlines in the second-rate Tory press than the lives and liberties of its luckless subjects."

Hew Edwards interviewed by Andrew Billen in The Times [£]: “You have to be a street fighter to survive. It’s true. And over the years you have to learn some skills in survival, especially in the BBC, which actually can be a treacherous place to be sometimes.”

Jon Sopel in the Observer on the Chris Wallace and Jonathan Swan interviews with Donald Trump: "What these two interviewers had in common is that they were white men. If you have sat in as many White House briefings as I have, you know the president does not react favourably to being challenged like this by women. He very quickly gets hot under the collar. He was so 'triggered' by a twentysomething female CNN reporter, Kaitlan Collins, that just before one press conference, White House staff tried to move a male reporter into her allocated front-row seat so she would be pushed to the back of the room and not be in Trump’s eyeline. There are endless more examples."

Mark Thompson, who is leaving as CEO of the New York Times after eight years, interviewed on McKinsey&Company: "When I got there, we had a print newsroom, with a few digital people. They’d make a wonderful print newspaper out of which they could get a website. And my notion was, it’s exactly the opposite of that. We want to make a great smartphone news product out of which we can get a website. And then we can curate a great physical paper out of our website."

Mark Sweney and Jim Waterson in the Guardian: "The Evening Standard is to sack a third of its employees, as the London freesheet seeks a dramatic reduction in costs to survive the coronavirus pandemic. The newspaper has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic as it relies on advertising for 80% of its revenues. The move comes a week after its owner, Evgeny Lebedev, was given a peerage by Boris Johnson’s government...The newspaper intends to cut its 167 newsroom staff by 69, a reduction of 40%."

Evgeny Lebedev in the Mail on Sunday: "I also want to register my reaction to the snobbery and casual racism which is still widespread throughout British society – even in surprising places. This is a racism that considers the House of Lords to be no place for someone such as me. Take, for example, the extensive coverage of me in The Guardian, that beacon of tolerance, over the past 12 months, where stories invariably describe me as ‘Russian’ or ‘Russian-born’ in their first sentences.  The newspaper might alternatively have chosen to describe me as a first-generation immigrant, who came to this country when I was eight, was educated in the British state school system, became a British citizen in 2010 and has also tried to make a difference by campaigning and fund-raising through my newspapers. But such a narrative doesn’t fit their prejudice that I am racially suspect, possibly corrupt and corrupting and maybe even a spy."

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