Hey #Kevinmyers I Fixed Your Article
A Feminist Version of the article Martin Ivens, Frank Fitzgibbon or John Burns Did Not Edit Correctly
The Kevin Myers row is the final proof — though none was needed — that his dreck passing for journalism and paid for by The Irish Independent, The Sunday Times and The Belfast Telegraph is both utterly sexist and irredeemably racist.
Equally horrifying has been the tiresome broflake monotone from Kev himself wailing and shrieking about how hard done by he is.
Note the silence from John Burns and his superior Martin Ivens at The Sunday Times, a straightforward commercial organization whoring for clicks that has no illusions about the wisdom of debasing itself in its unseemly grab for advertising revenue.
The Sunday Times function is to publish profitable articles which used to happen only if the presenters were provocative, contrarian bores, the like of which you can find in any English bar-room as closing-time approaches.
The underwear of these bar-room bores is more likely to contain a couple of hairy balls and an undersized penis than their complementary sex.
RTE, is, of course, different. Its journalists have this fake rehabilitative obligation to journalistic colleagues, and ex-colleagues who’ve been tedious contrarians for years. It discharged this obligation sycophantically and in a wholly-biased fashion on Monday morning when they continued to provide a platform for Myers’ sexism, racism and misogyny.
It is this increasingly marginalized duty, misogynist and sexist to its follicles of course, which causes the wholly erroneous belief that the staff who are hired to the exact same job description are not equal and do not deserve equal pay for equal work.
Naturally, the female presenters demanding equality with the top-paid men are demanding exactly the same for the Jamaican waitress in the BBC canteen and at all levels in the patriarchal hierarchy.
No woman checked or edited the Myers article this weekend.
Now, why are there no female headline editors at The Sunday Times?
Is it because 70-year-old white men like Kev are prettier? Is it because Myers, John Burns, Martin Ivens and Frank Fitzgibbon weigh and measure every word before they publish?
Is it because Martin Ivens, headline-writer supreme, didn’t run it by his wife, an editor at The Economist to admire and gush over his fine efforts before getting a little shut-eye on Saturday night?
None of the above.
No, it’s because a woman, ANY woman, even the Jamaican canteen worker whom Myers disparages so dismissively, could have done a better job than the incompetent triumvirate of Burns, Ivens and Fitzgibbon.
With half an eye, Anne McElvoy would’ve vetoed the headline if only she’d seen it on Ivens’ tablet on Saturday night.
All these men need to work harder, be more driven and edit the words that they are paid to check, in as charismatic as manner as humanly possible.
The human resources department of any broadsheet will tell you that white elderly and middle-aged men are a bunch of slackers, pretending they have an afternoon meeting when they are meeting with their mistresses downtown, they’re always getting sick then coming to the office hacking and coughing like martyrs and spreading their germs when they should be home recuperating. They need to work harder instead of skiving off to the pub to celebrate their latest child under the guise of visiting their wife at the hospital.
But most of all, men need to be more ambitious as regards the quality of their word. Editors need to actually READ the material they are paid to process, as shown by the quality of the material that slipped by Ivens and Fitzgibbon this weekend.
Men have that spotty-back testosterone-powered patriarchy-promoting free pass whereas feminists and fair-play advocates have been campaigning for a real meritocracy for decades.
Myers’ colleagues are desperately trying to turn the tide by trying to get unsuspecting readers to contaminate themselves by reading his back catalogue, with which I am tragically unacquainted.
Good for him, middle-aged and elderly talentless white men are not generally noted for their insistence on delivering high-quality work — they would rather rely on the inveterate lost-with-all-hands stupidity of the patriarchal old boys club, as perfectly illustrated by the article that was retracted and all the other drivel that Myers and his ilk have been writing for decades.
I wonder who Myers’ agent is. If it’s the same person who negotiated good money for the poor quality of the work of Ivens and Fitzgibbon then this person has found his/her true value in the marketplace.
Yet, even using the work “marketplace” in the absurd world of right-wing journalism is like putting “humane” and “Right-wing Fascist Rag” in the same sentence without a negative or retracting in horror.
Like the BBC, RTE depends on a compulsory licence fee and from that large pot of revenue come the preposterously extravagant appearance fees for washed-up bigots.
Quite simply, public service television with so many still-neglected national and cultural obligations towards society at large should not be paying such vast expenses to anyone. Of course, I’m showing my age but then so are the younger generation for almost no-one under 30 watches RTE anymore.
RTE, who kicked off Myers’ rehabilitation, metastasized into a very different kettle of rotten fish from its early precepts of public service with the decay starting at the very top and exemplified in the extravagant “expenses” for “star” journalists. There are no figures available for how much Myers gets for a TV appearance (my shot-in-the-dark guess: £2-3K) nor how much The Sunday Times usually pays him, but many people are dying to know.
My guess is £100K, around the same as what a prominent journalist would make. Included here are elderly male throwbacks who have stifled and corrupted all useful debate doing irreversible damage to Irish society every time they are invited by misguided editors like Geraldine Kennedy to participate in public debates in the deluded service of “bothsidesism”.
There are those who would rob the civil rights movement of its noble history, in Ireland as in the US, the history of decades of struggle, punctuated by, but not culminating in, the signing of the Civil Rights Bill in 1964 and the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998.
A movement has been born and is growing among women, minorities and other marginalized groups to use their political voice to gain equal pay or to ensure fair electoral lines to combat gerrymandering, to name but two examples. There are those who would denigrate these causes and use derogatory terms to describe these groups. When a public person uses the term Political Correctness or Identity Politics, it creates a culture that is demeaning to those who would be represented and respected.
Meanwhile, other newspapers such as The Irish Independent and The Irish Times, almost in compensation for their sordid past publishing of Myers’ vile and simplistic drivel, have now ignored the plank in their own eye and rush to hand-wring as Myers, like all bullies, whines and passes the buck.
He has reduced the once majestic An Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times to a popular travesty of all-white, male, west-brit patriarchal drivel.
The Brexit Vote was a retributive electoral choice by globalization’s left-behinds against affluent urbanity described succinctly by James Allworth in The Ultimatum Game.
Kevin Myers’ defining problem is that he is torn existentially between his ancestral duty to enrich the minds of his audience and his self-imposed ambition to compete in the televisual marketplace with populist programming — competing with Snapchat for clicks thereby demonstrating his “value” to the establishment. But the establishment has changed and slipped away and Myers didn’t see it happening.
Once his misogyny, antisemitism and bigotry were revealed (to a wider audience than his Irish one where most are inured to his idiocy), he promptly dissolved into crocodilian lachrymosity.
Babbling inanely to Emma he abjectly apologized by ONCE AGAIN reiterating a Jewish stereotype while the indignant female jewish broadcaster politely struggled to keep him on topic. Meanwhile, feminists at the BBC are striving for fair play for everybody, including the camera, canteen and cleaning staff.
The sycophantic Sean O’Rourke at RTE, Myers’ colleague at The Sunday Times (eyeing Myers’ seat, no doubt) and The Jewish Council (renounced by the community they claim to represent) have been wrathfully chewing the righteousness carpet and continue to regurgitate gobbledegook, denying the Holocaust Denial and supporting the rehabilitation of this Alt-right troll.
One of Myers’ line of defence was, believe it or not, “some of my best friends are jews”, plus, “my first two serious girlfriends were Jewish (and American)”. As if bragging about his Jewish conquests from 1955 made the slightest difference.
Middle-aged and elderly white men in particular, have angrily-the only mood they know-had the temerity to call Myers a victim of a witch hunt.
Some are more witch-like than others. Can you see the resemblance…
A fairly-average elderly male columnist in 800 indignant words of smouldering mediocrity will, without leaving his keyboard, dump his unedited doggerel on an innocent editor and earn more than a cleaning lady or a checkout girl will ever do in an entire week, plus Sunday overtime.
Again, I’d love to know, how much exactly?
Equality for all is a unicorn. Don’t wait for it or look for favours because of your chromosome count unless you’re a privileged white man who went to a posh English public school then gets into college in Ireland via a Foreign born student loophole to lecture the paddies. (Just testing my editors here for fact check; men and women have the same number of chromosomes — well spotted by El Penor Dignam.)
Get what you can with whatever talents you have, if unlike Kevin, you have a talent for anything besides contrarianism.
And ask yourself, how many women are billionaires. Chess grandmasters?
There are currently 35.
Since my three sons play chess at international level and I am frequently official photographer at chess events, I have a unique perspective on this but that’s a story for another day.
Mathematicians? Marian Finucane, Pat Kenny and I have the same elite engineering education that required honours maths but that, too, is a story for another day.
There’s a connection.
Mastery of money usually requires singular drive, ruthless logic, and instant artic-cold arithmetic.
I’ll be looking forward to hearing how Kev will be stretching his dole (I mean pension, over 70s do not get dole) money to keep himself in the style to which the Irish journalistic establishment has sponsored him to enjoy for years. Let us hope we never hear from him again, in the artic-frozen-out-of-public-debate position to which I earnestly hope Kev will be relegated.
Of course, as is their prerogative, the Irish media women are also aspiring to equal pay for equal work.
That’s impossible because of the ubiquity of middle-aged and elderly mediocre male journalists consistently and belligerently thwarting real transparency in current hierarchical structures.
But ya know, Kevin, your readers are dying fast and your drivel is no longer appreciated.
The heartbeat of your hardcore audience members whose pulse beats in time to your rabble-rousing misogyny is rapidly waning.
To the man who called innocent children bastards, who denigrated the struggles of the travelling people, who lumped the 54 countries of the African continent into one, who crushed the hopes of the weak, the distressed, the despised and the dispossessed:
Go home and be silent.
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