Thank you, Kevin Myers

Elliott Gotkine
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

When I was growing up in northwest London, my late father had a quaint way of ensuring he got the full picture when it came to the news: during the week, he took the (Conservative-supporting) Daily Telegraph. On Sundays, he read The Observer, which was firmly Labour. Perhaps confused by the opposing views he imbibed, he never voted. “They’re all as bad as each other,” he would complain.

The faces behind the bylines were a mystery to me — only marginally less so when I became a journalist myself. Back in those pre-Internet days, of three (and then four) TV channels, editors and news producers had to be more discerning with their output: there was less space.

Now, of course, we’re “blessed” with seemingly unlimited content, much of which is fed to us through the prism of “friends” and the people we follow on Facebook and Twitter. It was thanks to such innovations that I found myself trawling through comment after jaw-dropped comment on the Kevin Myers article in The Sunday Times Irish edition — an article that set out to be simply offensive to women, but which somehow took its invective to a whole new level by throwing in a hackneyed dollop of anti-Semitism (if you’ve yet to read it, try here and here for the most offensive bits).

The steady stream of shock posed a number of questions. First, of course, is how on earth someone who denies the Holocaust and says Africa’s only gift to the world is AIDS can be published by a newspaper as august as The Sunday Times (yes it was the Irish Edition, but nuances like these are pointless if it appears under a Sunday Times banner)? Who was responsible for approving it? And whose heads will roll?

The article was taken down. The editor apologisedfor the Kevin Myers article he accidentally commissioned, approved, edited and published”, and said it should never have been published in the first place. But the fact that it was shouldn’t really come as a surprise. The news business is cutthroat. And you can almost sympathise with an under-pressure-editor who commissions a writer that can guarantee clicks and readers.

But like chemical weapons in democracies and white people using the N- word, there are some lines that just shouldn’t be crossed — especially by publications that wish to be held in our esteem: this was The Sunday Times (Irish edition), not the Daily Mail or Breitbart!.

Of course, in a world where editing standards are declining, and where White House Press Secretaries don’t know how to say “off-the-record”, there is one positive for which we should thank Kevin Myers: the universal condemnation his article provoked, its removal and his subsequent firing show that despite Brexit and despite Trump, the world hasn’t fully lost its moral marbles. At least, not yet.

Elliott Gotkine

Written by

Journalist| MC | Moderator |Media Coach | Comms Director | (Ex BBC/Bloomberg TV correspondent)

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade