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."

Media Quotes of the Week: From President-elect Trump continues his war on media to President Obama on the dangers created by 'fake news'

New York Post on Trump's media summit with network chiefs: "Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sitdown on Monday, sources told The Post.'It was like a f–ing firing squad,' one source said of the encounter. Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ the source said."

Jon Snow ‏@jonsnowC4 on Twitter: "Hard to imagine in the Western world, media bosses being summoned and abused in such a way: Though Idi Amin once did it to me in 1977."

Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior aide to Barack Obama, quoted by the Guardian: “If your media outlet is focused on Trump v Hamilton instead of Trump’s $25m fraud settlement, you are a sad pawn in Trump’s game.”

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump on Twitter: "Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world. Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!"

Donald Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon, interviewed by Michael Woolf in the Hollywood Reporter: "The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what's wrong with this country. It's just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what's going on. If The New York Times didn't exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It's a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening."

Bannon on the Murdochs: "They got it more wrong than anybody, Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical."

CNN's Christiane Amanpour, speaking in New York after accepting the Committee to Project Journalists' Burton Benjamin Memorial Award: "I never in a million years thought I would be up here on stage appealing for the freedom and safety of American journalists at home."

AA Gill in the Sunday Times Magazine [£]: "I’ve got cancer. Sorry to drop that onto the breakfast table apropos of nothing at all. Apropos and cancer are rarely found in the same sentence. I wasn’t going to mention it, the way you don’t. In truth, I’ve got an embarrassment of cancer, the full English. There is barely a morsel of offal not included. I have a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy."

The NUJ in a statement on the Investigatory Powers Bill: "The bill is an attack on democracy and on the public’s right to know and it enables unjustified, secret, state interference in the press. The government has argued the bill is about dealing with national security and serious crime but what they have actually done is use terrorism as an excuse to give themselves new powers to spy on journalists.

 Motion passed by City University's Students' Union:

This Union Resolves:

1. That there is no place for the Sun, Daily Mail or Express (In their current form) on City, University of London campuses or properties.

2. To promote, amongst City students, the active pressuring of the aforementioned media outlets to cease to fuel fascism, racial tension and hatred in society.

3. To unite with other student bodies, community organisations, and businesses, to bring about a tangible change in the way the UK’s media operate.

4. To use the University’s industry contacts to reach out to employees and shareholders of the media outlets in question.

5. To provide the resources and meeting space needed to organise direct action, online and social media campaigns.

City journalism student Jack Fenwick on The Huffington Post: "Add in the fact that the word fascism was spelt incorrectly in the title of the motion and you’re left with a scene from a dark sitcom. Twitter has today been awash with high-profile journalists deriding this horrible decision. But they must understand that this terrible, terrible SU does not represent the thousands of liberal, intelligent minds that are today embarrassed by a decision that has been made on their behalf. To all students in the country who feel let down by a culture of censorship and anti-free speech within our elected student officials and activists, the time has come for change. Let’s not let them get away with it any longer."

Harriet Marsden in the Independent: "One of the first things I learnt at City is that the Sun and the Daily Mail are the two most widely-read newspapers in the country.  This means that students voted to ban the news publications that most of their country is reading, even while there are those studying at the university who are ostensibly learning how to produce news for their country. Some students are even taught by professors who have worked for these papers. They voted in the full knowledge that many City graduates will go on to work for those papers, and even aspire to do so."

Barack Obama on fake news, as reported by Tech Crunch: "Because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation, and it’s packaged very well, and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television, where some overzealousness on the part of a U.S. official is equated with constant and severe repression elsewhere, if everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect. We won’t know what to fight for. And we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted."

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