Thursday 15 June 2017

Media Quotes of the Week: From Guardian glee as Tory tabloids take beating over May election flop to it's goodbye to Berliner and hello to tabloid format



Polly Toynbee in the Guardian: "But oh to see Paul Dacre’s face when the exit poll came in! After the Daily Mail editor’s 13-page savage trashing of the Corbyn team, he saw his greatest acolyte, May, fail, despite a hysterical anti-Labour hate-campaign from his paper, the Sun and the Telegraph. But expect no humble pie from them."


Suzanne Moore in the Guardian: "It’s the Sun wot didn’t win it. And despite the Mail’s pages and pages of frenzied warnings about how electing communist terrorists would be the end of the world, the Mail didn’t do it for their woman either."


Ex-Guardian journalist David Hearst in Middle East Eye says the Guardian has run many anti-Corbyn articles: "The Guardian ploughed on, planting the knife in Corbyn's back so many times and in so many ways, that Caesar's murder looked like the work of a lone wolf."


John Simpson @JohnSimpsonNews on Twitter: "I suspect we've seen the end of the tabloids as arbiters of UK politics. Sun, Mail & Express threw all they had into backing May, & failed."


Ex-director of communications at Downing Street Katie Perrior in The Times [£]: "If you run a presidential style campaign with a woman who doesn’t like media interviews, then you have to accept that it’s better to do them and run the risk that they go badly than look like you are running scared. Journalists have been falling over each other to complain that this was the first election in 40 years in which the serving prime minister had not appeared on their shows. Tony Blair was mocked in 2001 as being willing to crawl over cracked glass to get himself and his team on their airwaves. By not participating, it looks like the prime minister thought it was all beneath her."


Will Gore in the Independent: "Just as the Remain campaign last year misjudged the degree to which voters can be motivated by fear, so in this campaign the Conservative leader and her friends in the media wrongly assumed that attacks against Labour’s leaders would be enough to secure a Tory win. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, the politics of hate. And it didn’t work. The Prime Minister this morning is weakness and wobbliness personified. But make no mistake, this is an extraordinary moment for Britain’s right-wing press, which for so long has been perceived to have a hold over the electorate. The Express is on the ropes. The Daily Mail is bruised. The “Currant Bun” is crumbling."


Will Hutton in the Observer: "The Sun and Mail may want a hard Brexit and continued austerity, bullying and bamboozling Mrs May that the majority does too: but a majority in the country does not – the heart of her and her party’s dilemma. It is not the citizens’ fault that in desperation they feel their only reaction is to bin the papers that helped create this pretty pass. It is the proprietors and their editors who have so abused the role of journalism in a democracy. It has also become self-defeating. After all, it was the Sun wot hung it."


Boris Johnson on WhatsApp warns against mischief-making media:



The Guardian confirms it will drop the Berliner format to go tabloid next year: "The Guardian and Observer will relaunch in a tabloid format next year as part of a three-year plan to break even in their finances. Guardian Media Group (GMG), the parent company of the Guardian and Observer print and digital businesses, has decided to move from its Berliner newspaper format to the smaller size as part of a major cost-saving drive. The Guardian has signed a contract for Trinity Mirror, publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, to print the titles from early next year."

[£]=paywall



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