Thursday 29 June 2017

Media Quotes of the Week: From should UK broadcasters be patriotic ? - like in the Soviet Union - to Time calls time on fake Trump cover




Andrea Leadsom interviewed about Brexit on Newsnight: “It would be helpful if broadcasters were willing to be a bit patriotic.”


John Simpson‏@JohnSimpsonNews on Twitter: "Depressing to hear @andrealeadsom echoing the Soviet view of broadcasting - that its duty is to be 'patriotic' - i.e. to back views of govt."


Robert Peston@Peston on Twitter: "Shout out to @andrealeadsom: we've been listening to you! Look what we've done to Croissant Corner on @pestononsunday"


Mark Damazer in The Times [£]: "I suspect Leadsom’s remarks to Emily Maitlis were naive and daft rather than intended to be menacing. But there is a point to be made. The BBC’s refusal (and not only the BBC’s) over decades to allow the 'patriotic interest' to be defined by the government — any government — is what keeps it alive."


Polly Toynbee in the Guardian: "Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis stood her ground with admirable aplomb. Leadsom is a comical figure, but as the going gets tougher expect more sinister pressures."


Emily Bell in the Guardian on the Grenfell Tower fire and local media: "The revolution in ground-level local media has never taken off in the way it was meant to. The local blogs run by tenants, activists and other citizens, find themselves isolated and crowded out in clogged social streams, short on attention, funding and traction. Often they rely on the tenacity and unpaid labour of their founders for survival...Covering local housing meetings is an unglamorous beat for any journalist; hardly anyone reads your work, almost nobody cares what happens in the meetings, and the pay is extremely low. Yet it is hard to argue there are more civically important jobs for journalism than reporting the daily machinations of local power."


Gary Younge in Prospect magazine on Jeremy Corbyn: "There are two main reasons why many journalists were wrong-footed. The first was a chronic lack of curiosity. This, I believe, to be the most egregious professional malpractice. The issue here is not whether they supported Corbyn or even Labour but the brazen certainty with which so many dismissed him and his supporters, and the credulity with which they treated his detractors...The second great failure of journalism was the failure to expand the gaze from Corbyn, the individual, to broader forces and places."


Tim Walker in the New Statesman on the Mail and Telegraph: "I know these papers well, having spent the best part of a quarter-century working for them, and I don’t care to see them like this. When I worked there, a degree of independent thought was permitted on both titles. I joined the Telegraph in 2002; at the time, my colleagues spoke with pride of the paper’s tolerance to opposing views. And when I was at the Mail, it happily employed the former Labour MP Roy Hattersley. Would I be able to run positive stories about, say, my mate Gina Miller – who successfully campaigned for parliamentary scrutiny of the Brexit process – in the Telegraph if I were there today? Or at the Daily Mail? Dream on: it’s two minutes of hate for that 'enemy of the people'."


Daily Mail in a full page comment: "The Guardian published a cartoon so sick and disgusting – so deranged and offensive to the four million decent, humane and responsible people who read us – that we owe it to every one of them to lay to rest this malicious smear...The Guardian was telling its followers that the Daily Mail and its readers are vicious bigots with the blood of innocent, peace-loving Muslims on their hands....For the Guardian’s editor to publish such deluded, defamatory nonsense – which in itself is a naked incitement to violence – speaks volumes about the hatred that drives this ‘voice of liberalism’. The truth is that the Guardian and the fascist Left are the real purveyors of hate in this country."


Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times [£]: "A third-division Guardian writer called Sophie Heawood wrote recently that she looked forward to the day when all Daily Mail readers were dead. That’s more than 3m people. So staggering did I find this that I rang Impress, set up by Max Mosley and the Hacked Off moppets to regulate the press, to see what it thought. I rang three times but it wouldn’t comment. I really wanted to speak to the boss of Impress. That’s a man called Jonathan Heawood. Yup, Sophie’s brother."


The Times [£] in a leader welcomes European Commission fining Google €2.42 billion for taking “illegal advantage” of its market dominance to hurt competitors and deny consumers “genuine choice”:  "The Times has a stake in this argument. Our parent company, News Corporation, is an interested third party in this case and has submitted a complaint in a parallel one focused on news. We make no apology for taking sides. The internet and businesses that use it are by and large a boon, but it should not be the new wild west. The EU is acting as American anti-trust legislators did against Standard Oil in 1911, in the public interest, and about time too."


Donald J. Trump‏@realDonaldTrump on Twitter: "So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!"

Fake cover
Huffington Post reports: "Time on Tuesday asked the Trump Organization to remove any fake covers of the magazine displayed at the presidential family’s business properties. The magazine’s request to the group came after a Washington Post report revealed that several of President Donald Trump’s golf courses had a framed copy of a doctored Time cover, which featured the commander in chief as the cover story."


[£]=paywall

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