Thursday, 4 March 2021

Media Quotes of the Week: From Professor Greenslade's ethics lesson: If you want a Fleet Street career hide your support for the IRA - to online abuse reduced sports reporter to tears




Roy Greenslade in an article for the British Journalism Review republished by the Sunday Times [£] on his support for the IRA while working for national newspapers:
 "I knew that to own up to supporting Irish republicans would result in me losing my job. I could have taken that step myself by walking out on principle. But the idea of forsaking a Fleet Street career — indeed, a career of any kind in journalism — was unthinkable. I couldn’t conceive of doing anything else. Join an agitprop publication? I couldn’t see a future there. Become a librarian, a schoolboy dream? It wasn’t really a feasible alternative. Anyway, I needed a wage because I was on the verge of taking on a mortgage. Better, then, to button my lip and carry on."

Michael Crick on Greenslade's subsequent resignation from City University where he lecturered in journalism ethics: "Roy Greenslade tells me his decision was: 'Purely mine. No pressure. Just the reverse.' So City University wanted him to stay, it seems. It has to be said that since 2018 his work at City University was no longer very substantial."
  • A City University spokesman said: “While acknowledging Professor Greenslade’s contribution and his right to express his views, the university has accepted his resignation.”
Roy Greenslade in Press Gazette: “The furore underlines the main point of my article: to have come clean in the 1970s with my beliefs would have rendered me unemployable. I did nothing more than the scores of journalists who keep their political views to themselves. My opinions did not affect my journalistic work, nor did they affect my university teaching. As many of my more attentive students would surely recall, I was open about being a republican.”

Ex-Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie on Twitter: "I always knew Roy Greenslade was a shit. I didn't know he was a pro violence IRA supporting shit. In the Sunday Times he reveals that while working for me at The Sun, editing the Mirror and being a media critic he backed IRA scum killing our people. A complete c***. So while trying to attract readers as editor of the Daily Mirror Roy Greenslade didnt care that the IRA would kill a few. What a vile duplicitous scumbag he is."

Peter Wilby in the New Statesman: "Greenslade, in high-minded columns for the Guardian, instructed journalists on how to conduct themselves. Those columns now look shabby and hypocritical."

The Times [£] reports: "The Guardian has launched a review of Roy Greenslade’s articles after it was accused of allowing him to question the credibility of a woman who accused an IRA member of raping her...The newspaper’s investigation follows a complaint from Máiría Cahill, a politician and member of a prominent republican family who waived anonymity to allege that she was raped by a senior IRA figure as a teenager. Greenslade wrote several articles on the Cahill case for The Guardian while employed as its media commentator."

Ex-International Federation of Journalists general secretary Aidan White on Twitter: "I wonder, Roy, whether you think a word of apology is due to those thousands of journalism students at City University who you schooled in the importance of ethical journalism?"

Journalist Mic Wright on his blog: "If there’s any moral to Greenslade’s story it’s that the British media was and remains a place where most people hide their real beliefs in return for a salary. The rest? Well, they just ratchet up their worst thoughts, put them down on the page, and get jobs for life as columnists."


Report by the office of the US director of national intelligence: "We assess that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi."


Prince Harry to James Corden, as reported by BBC News:
"It was a really difficult environment as a lot of people saw. We all know what the British press can be like. And it was destroying my mental health. I was like, this is toxic. So I did what any husband and what any father would do - I need to get my family out of here."


Jan Moir in the Daily Mail on the James Corden interview with Prince Harry:
"Clearly, the Prince is much more comfortable with the kind of media coverage that only friends and wedding guests can provide. Throughout the fun, 17-minute clip, Corden came across like a clammy flunkey oozing obsequiousness and throbbing with a desire to make his royal guest look good, even if that meant flagellating himself."


Society of Editors executive director Ian Murray in a tribute to the first SoE executive director Bob Satchwell, who has died aged 73: 
“Bob was one life’s great communicators and this gift made him superbly able to fight his many battles on behalf of the press. From Leveson to the creation of IPSO, from threats to Freedom of Information, to the countless other attempts to stifle free speech, Bob was always there in the fight."


Gulnoza Said, the Committee to Protect Journalists' Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in response to the sentencing of one of the suspects in Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, as well as new indictments for additional suspects:
“We welcome the first sentencing in Daphne Caruana Galizia’s case as a long-awaited step towards justice in one of Europe’s most prominent journalist killings. Maltese authorities should take all measures to ensure that all the perpetrators of this crime, including its masterminds, are brought to justice.”
  • Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb in October 2017. On February 23, one of the defendants, Vincent Muscat, plead guilty of murder and other crimes related to the killing, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

A Writing Chance, a new initiative supported by the Mirror and New Statesman, looking for new and aspiring writers from working-class and lower income backgrounds, says: "It’s not right that a London-centric industry; unpaid and low-paid internships; the casualisation of jobs; and a reliance on personal contacts make finding work in the media far more difficult for people from working-class and lower income backgrounds."


BBC sports reporter Sonja McLaughlan on Twitter after her post match interviews following the Wales vs England rugby match attracted online abuse: "
Toxic, embarrassing, disgraceful, appalling. Just some of the feedback I’ve had. Thanks for using @ sign so it’s all hit home. Now imagine getting inundated with abuse for doing your job. In my car crying. Hope you’re happy."
  • KayBurley on Twitter: "Head up, shoulders back, Sonja. You did a great job."
[£]=pawall

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