Friday 4 January 2013

Quotes of the Week: Martin Kelner's good-bye to the Guardian to what stops the Eye being boring


Martin Kelner in his farewell Screen break column after 16 years with the Guardian: "No hard feelings, by the way. This newspaper, like the rest of us, is having to embrace austerity. As even middle-class families find it necessary to forgo fripperies like meals out and weekends away – and those less well-fixed do without luxuries like shoes and food – so this newspaper trims its sails too. Think of me as a spring break in a lovely spa resort we can no longer stump up for."

Michael Buerk on the BBC's Queen's Jubilee coverage, in the Mail on Sunday: "The Dunkirk Little Ships, the most evocative reminders of this country’s bravest hour, were ignored so that a pneumatic bird-brain from Strictly Come Dancing could talk to transvestites in Battersea Park."

Mark Lawson in the Guardian: "If broadcasters and newspapers failed the public over Savile, there is little question that a crucial accomplice to the crime were the British laws of defamation, which, as in earlier cases such as Robert Maxwell's financial frauds, allowed a powerful and well-connected figure to avoid scrutiny through careful use of writs or the threat of them to terrify the accuser with the prospect of financial ruin. In this respect, the most important of Lord Justice Leveson's recommendations may be the suggested framework for swifter and cheaper defamation hearings."

The Times [£] on lobbying: "The group on media reform, whose stated purpose is to 'discuss advantages and disadvantages of different media regulation', is given secretarial services by Hacked Off, the campaign group calling for statutory regulation of the press."

Robert Hardman in the Mail: "The internet has brought untold blessings and advancements to the way we live. But I would not say that Twitter is one of them. At best, it is a succinct method of despatching a brief round-robin. More often, it just encourages us to be self-centred — to waste time and to become crashing bores."

John Gapper in the Financial Times [£]: "A decade ago, I attended a worthy conference on the future of newspapers at which a speaker showed a chart of the low revenues from online advertising. The line rose over the years until – about now, as I recall – it exceeded that for print. At the time, it looked like an awful warning; it now turns out to have been absurdly optimistic."

Peter Oborne in the Telegraph on the death of Christopher Martin-Jenkins: "CMJ would never have had a chance of breaking through today as a cricket commentator in the 21st-century BBC sports department. He stood for everything the corporation’s middle management hates most: his elegant diction, eccentricity, deep religious belief, perfect courtesy, public school education, refusal to sensationalise, dislike of modernity, sense of right and wrong, above all his quiet conservatism."

Tony Rushton, the retiring art editor of Private Eye, in an interview in the Independent: "If you took away the cartoons from Private Eye it would be a very boring magazine, a worthy, boring magazine."

[£] = paywall

No comments: