Peter Worthington has had an amazing life. And his obituary, which he wrote himself, certainly has an arresting opening line.
Where journalists have greatness thrust upon them
Jon Slattery
A freelance journalist writing from the UK.
Updated: 3 hours 17 min ago
Quotes of the Week: From nightmare interview with Ginger Baker to Fleet Street's Fergie frenzy
17 May 2013 - 12:00am
Michael Hann on the Guardian's Music Blog on interviewing drummer Ginger Baker (top) in front of a live audience: "I've had peculiar interviews before. I once sat on the floor in the dressing rooms at Spurs' training ground to talk to Sol Campbell, while John Scales stood just to my right, listening in. He was naked. His penis kept dangling in and out of my eyeline at disconcertingly close range. But I've never had any interview experience quite so unsettling as half an hour with Ginger Baker in front of a couple of hundred people. It's not something I want to repeat."
- Mark Ellen interviewed an irascible Ginger Baker for The Word in 2009, you can read an extract here.
Police Federation chairman Steve Williams, as quoted by the Daily Mail: "There’s been a sea change on the back of Leveson. Cops are very reluctant to speak to the media and say how it really is."
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian: "Giving in to terrorism has given data intrusion, "back door" surveillance and press restriction all the best tunes. The Pentagon pleads 9/11 and Whitehall pleads 7/7. Lord Justice Leveson can only plead Hugh Grant, but he is enough. They all say they want a "responsible press". But the direction of travel is the same, towards the pollution of freedom. Acts of government that would once have caused outrage are now met with a shrug."
Jeremy Clarkson in the Sunday Times [£]: "I’m constantly being hauled over the coals in the Daily Mail and the Daily Star and the Mirror for all sorts of things. Calling Gordon Brown a one-eyed Scottish idiot. Saying public sector workers should be executed. Sparking fury with fox enthusiasts. I’m portrayed as an evil, racist, homophobic misogynist who goes through life stabbing baby badgers for fun. And I’ve worked out that it makes no difference. Taxi drivers still pick me up. People still watch my television shows. My books aren’t remaindered for weeks; sometimes months. That’s because the endless criticism is just a background hum. The BBC should accept this. It should make decisions on what it thinks to be right, not on how that decision will be reviewed in the next day’s papers."
Grey Cardigan responds to a PR on TheSpinAlley: “Dear Kacey-Lee. Thank you for your interest in the well-being of myself and my family. Unfortunately I couldn’t get out in the sun to enjoy myself because I am twice-divorced and therefore don’t have enough money to even pay for a Mr Whippy. As for a barbecue, a Lidl sausage toasted over a blow-lamp is about my limit. My children won’t talk to me, my latest ex-wife is shagging an investment banker while still shafting me for every penny she can get, and I can’t go out in the sun because I have red hair and turn bright crimson if I even walk past a microwave oven. Anyway, it was rainy and foggy up here, somewhere north of Kensington, so there was no sun anyway. Oh, and my dog died, which somewhat took the gloss off the weekend…”
David Simon in The Observer: "You already have too much prior restraint of the British press. I couldn't operate under your press law, couldn't do good journalism consistently. Your ability to criticise people in public or reveal secrets that are in the public's interest are much more constrained than ours. And I find that to be unworkable in terms of democracy."
The Times [£]: "Local authorities are threatening to withdraw advertising from newspapers that publish stories they do not like, according to a survey that examined the impact of the Leveson inquiry on the local press. Nearly half of all local newspaper editors believe that the inquiry into press standards has negatively affected their titles’ relationship with readers. More than a quarter (27 per cent) had received a threat from a public body to suspend advertising as a result of journalistic activity, such as a story being published, a query being made or a reporter attending a meeting."
Brian Cathcart, the executive director of Hacked Off, in a letter to regional newspaper editors, as reported by HoldtheFrontPage: “You may be concerned that any changes to the press regulation system could make your job harder and put extra burdens on regional and local papers. That’s what the Newspaper Society has been warning. I am writing to say that what the Newspaper Society has been telling you is not correct. The Royal Charter approved by all parties in Parliament in March is good for working journalists, good for the regional and local press – and good for the public."
Private Eye on coverage of Alex Ferguson's retirement: "Perhaps the most spectacular example of Stockholm syndrome was displayed by the BBC. Having been sent to Coventry by Ferguson for a full seven years after daring to expose his son Jason's activities as a football agent - a ban which ended only in 2011 - the corporation found the perfect pundit to pay tribute to Sir Alex on Radio Five Live. Step-up long-standing Fergie friend and fellow Labour stalwart Alastair Campbell, the man whose rabid desire to 'fuck Gilligan' over the BBC's WMD story in 2003 brought the corporation as close to extinction as it has ever been."
Piers Morgan @piersmorgan on Twitter: "'I've never held a grudge against the media, not my style' - Sir Alex Ferguson, who refused to speak to BBC for 5yrs."
BBC Sport Interactive editor Stuart Rowson @StuartRowson on Twitter: "Led by the #MUFC and Fergie coverage, last week was the biggest ever outside of the Olympics for @bbcsport - 17.3m unique UK browsers."
SubScribe by Gameoldgirl on Press Gazette: "The Ferguson retirement killed almost as many trees as the Iron Lady's death. Every daily newspaper, bar the Express, lost touch with reality in a race to be the most obsequious...This is daft. The Knight of the Hairdryer is a football manager. He is retiring, he has not died - and even if he had, this would still be over the top."
[£] = paywall
New survey on legal claims made against media
14 May 2013 - 10:28am
A new survey hoping to establish solid data on the nature and quantity of legal claims made against the media in the UK, is being conducted by Judith Townend, who runs the Meeja Law blog.
She says: "There is very little solid data about the nature and quantity of legal claims made against the media, including small bloggers. Because the majority of libel claims, for example, are believed to be resolved out of court, there is no complete record of disputes. In short, little is known about bloggers’ and journalists’ actual legal experiences and opinions."
The questionnaire can be found here:
- The questionnaire is open to all types of journalists and online writers who expect their readership to be predominantly based in England and/or Wales.
- It should take between 10 and 30 minutes to complete, depending on your experiences and views. Some questions require an answer so you can be taken to the next relevant question.
- All data will be collected anonymously with no identification of organisations or individuals.
Quotes of the Week: From a fond farewell for Ferguson to Burchill on the joy of punctuation
10 May 2013 - 12:00am
Mark Ogden in the Telegraph on Alex Ferguson and the press: "Many reporters have been banned, myself included, for a vast number of random reasons. They have been banned for getting stories wrong and getting them right. Others have been exiled for writing books about Ferguson or making oblique references that have irked him deep within their articles. Yet Ferguson’s departure will be mourned by those who are employed to report on United, regardless of the bans, the hairdryers and the flying voice recorders. One sentence from Ferguson can carry more weight than a thousand words from his managerial counterparts – which can be a negative as well as positive quality – but being witness to the Ferguson years at United has been a rare privilege."
Greg Dyke in the Sunday Times [£] on the BBC row with the Government over the 'sexed up' dossier: "The basic allegations were that they sexed up the dossier — I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Our story was fundamentally right. It was not completely right, but then journalism is not an exact science. What was clear was: did they sex up the dossier? Yes. Did they know they were sexing it up? Yes. About the only person who I’ve ever come across who doesn’t believe that is Alastair Campbell.”
Peter Preston in The Observer: "Northern newsrooms – like Midlands correspondents and the rest – have all but vanished. Local news agencies feeding the nationals are similarly diminished. London, reaching for its newspaper or clicking online each morning, gets no consistent sense of what non-metropolitan life is like."
Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times [£]: "Bullying is another word that has long since lost its original meaning. It no longer refers to someone having his head put down the lavatory; it now means to compromise someone’s opinion of themselves by suggesting that they might have got something wrong."
The Guardian in a leader: "One of the final arbiters of press regulation in this country is likely to be a former military intelligence officer who once successfully sued a British media organisation for reporting that he was part of an SAS operation training allies of the dictator Pol Pot in Cambodia. The libel trial was halted after the then defence secretary granted authority for gagging orders – public interest immunity certificates – preventing evidence about the security services from being disclosed to the court. Too far fetched, even in the feverish world of post-Leveson wranglings? Alas not. Under any proposal for a press royal charter, the ultimate fate of media regulation would be the subject of private conversations between the head of the privy council (Nick Clegg) and the aforesaid individual – Sir Christopher Geidt, private secretary to the Queen (and, inevitably, himself a member of the privy council)."
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, quoted in the Daily Mail: "Police briefing against arrested individuals to pressure or punish is clearly abusive but it’s equally chilling for officers to refuse to confirm names of those detained or charged."
Sun Royal editor Duncan Larcombe in a statement after being charged with bribery offences: "I hope to demonstrate that I am a responsible journalist who reported in the public interest. As a royal reporter I worked harder than any other at the Palace putting in place and ensuring the application of a series of criteria that had to be satisfied before a story would appear in my paper. For the past year I have had to remain silent but my aim now is to fight these allegations with every breath in my body in the hope that justice and common sense will prevail."
Grey Cardigan on TheSpinAlley: "I had expected great things of the re-designed websites of Local World’s regional newspapers. Surely a company so wedded to digital expansion would produce something useful and accessible, sexy and sophisticated. So I was more than a little disappointed when I clicked on one of the re-launched sites to find something that looked like it had been put together by a 14-year-old kid in his bedroom… in 1996. Huge tabloid fonts smashing you in the face, negligible help with navigation, poor or non-existent labelling – they’re a real mess and about as sexy as an unflushed toilet."
Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail on her days as a Guardian journalist: "Increasingly, I saw how journalists on highbrow papers write primarily for other journalists or to impress politicians or other members of the great and the good. They don’t actually like ordinary people — especially the lower middle class, the strivers who believed in self-discipline and personal responsibility. They dismiss them as narrow-minded, parochial and prejudiced (unlike themselves, of course)."
Michael Wolff on USA Today: "Murdoch survives. And his fortune has only increased. But the legacy he has most wanted, a permanent patrimony for his papers, and the conveyance of his company from his leadership to his children's, is still a struggle that, at 82, he will not win."
Julie Burchill on her husband Daniel Raven in the Sunday Times Magazine [£]: "Dan is the only person who’s more obsessed with punctuation than I am. It’s the secret of a good marriage, sex and punctuation.”
[£] = paywall
