Media Quotes of the Week: From anger at Rees-Mogg 'knave or fool' attack on HuffPost journalist to fears BBC London exodus could hit local press

NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet in a statement after Jacob Rees-Mogg accused HuffPost UK's deputy political editor Arj Singh of being "either a knave or a fool" over an exclusive story about Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab based on a leaked video call: “It’s not acceptable to dismiss reporting you don’t like as fake news. It’s completely unacceptable to resort to insults and personal smears of journalists simply trying to get on with their job. Our elected politicians should be committed to improving the parlous level of public discourse, not further polluting it.”

• Rees-Mogg repeated a Foreign Office statement which claimed the audio containing Raab’s remarks had been “deliberately and selectively clipped to distort”.  He told MPs: “If the journalist didn’t clip it himself, he ought to have known it was clipped. He is either a knave or a fool.” Huff Post claims Raab later confirmed its story that the government didn’t want to exclude countries from trade deals solely because they fell below European Convention on Human Rights standards.

Huff Post political editor Paul Waugh: "Exposing both his snobbery (he claimed The Times would never report what HuffPost UK did) and his ignorance (the Times used the exact same quote on its front page), Rees-Mogg showed that beneath all the fake politesse of his concocted young fogey persona there lurks a man scared to death of scrutiny. In that, maybe he’s just following his boss’s lead. Yet we’ll probably wait in vain for Rees-Mogg to condemn a former journalist who literally made up a quote and was sacked from The Times as a result: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. There’s no distorting that fact, not the most salient one of all: the 125,000 deaths and counting from Covid on their watch."

Jane Martinson in the Guardian: "Those in power have often denied news stories, of course. What seems different now is the ad hominem attacks on the journalists themselves when the evidence is hard to argue with...Allowing ministers to call journalists names for doing their job is not just a matter for HuffPost, it should be a matter for us all."

HoldtheFrontPage reports: "Reach plc has told most of its journalists they will permanently work from home in future, prompting office closures across the country. Reach says it will instead maintain hub offices filled with meeting rooms in Belfast, Bristol, Birmingham, Dublin, Cardiff, Glasgow, Newcastle, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Greater Manchester, Nottingham, Plymouth and an office in the South-East of England. This means daily titles including the Cambridge News, Derby Telegraph, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, Leicester Mercury, North Wales Daily Post and Stoke-on-Trent daily The Sentinel will no longer have an office on patch – along with many of its ‘Live’ network of more than 70 regional news websites and other newspapers in its 110-strong portfolio of titles."  

• Iliffe editorial director Ian Carter on Twitter: "Very mixed feelings on this. We know we can all work remotely, we know investing in editorial is more important than office space. But never being in the newsroom for a breaking story? Missing out on trainees learning from seniors - and seniors learning from trainees? Not so sure."

Ray Snoddy on Mediatel on Covid-19: "If there is a pressing need for an inquiry into the action of the Government, some newspapers also need to think long and hard about what they have been doing. Could they too have caused unnecessary deaths by misleading their readers on the true scale of the Covid-19 threat, mocking scientists and spurring on Boris Johnson to new levels of irresponsibility?"

Jed Mercurio in a GQ interview: "You get a certain cohort of prominent journalists who don’t know any science, but feel that they’re libertarians and contrarians and they practise disinformation... These people are fundamentally a bunch of c***s.”

England rugby manager Eddie Jones tackles rugby journalists, quoted by the Guardian: "I don’t think there is any such thing as confidence, you either think rightly or you think wrongly, and the wrong time you start to listen to the poison that’s written in the media, that rat poison gets into players’ heads. We try to keep it out of their head. We try to spray all that rat poison that you try to put in and get it out of their head, so we are always working hard to keep it out of their heads. It keeps me busy, mate."

BBC News reports: "A US private investigator has told BBC News he was paid by the Sun newspaper to obtain personal information about the Duchess of Sussex in the early days of her relationship with Prince Harry. But Daniel Hanks says he unlawfully accessed detailed information including Meghan's social security number. The Sun's publisher said it requested legitimate research and instructed Mr Hanks he must act lawfully."

• A spokesman for Harry and Meghan said: "The Duke and Duchess of Sussex feel that today is an important moment of reflection for the media industry and society at large, as this investigative report shows that the predatory practices of days past are still ongoing, reaping irreversible damage for families and relationships. They are grateful to those working in media who stand for upholding the values of journalism, which are needed now more than ever before."

BBC director general Tim Davie on plans to move staff and departments out of London: "People must feel we are closer to them. This shift will create a much more distributed model that moves not just people, but power and decision-making to the UK's Nations and regions."

• The plans include: "A new generation of 100 new reporters to be based in towns and areas that have never had a regional TV presence."

News Media Association chairman HenryFaure Walker, responding to BBC’s plans for a network of digital community journalists, said in a statement: "Through the Local News Partnership - which includes the widely-praised Local Democracy Reporting Service - the BBC and the local news media sector have successfully forged a partnership which has provided a shot in the arm for local public interest journalism. Crucially, this has been achieved without state competition distorting the marketplace.  Any new investment in local journalism by the BBC should be channelled through the existing LNP and most certainly not through this ill-advised new venture which will hurt independent local news providers at a time when they are needed by the public more than ever.”