CAA withdraws complaints and commends Sunday Times following meeting to discuss Kevin Myers’ antisemitic column
Campaign Against Antisemitism has met with members of the senior management of the Sunday Times to discuss how it came to publish an antisemitic column by Kevin Myers in July.
The column by Kevin Myers contained the following paragraph about the BBC pay row: “I note that two of the best-paid women presenters in the BBC — Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, with whose, no doubt, sterling work I am tragically unacquainted — are Jewish. Good for them. Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity. I wonder, who are their agents? If they’re the same ones that negotiated the pay for the women on the lower scales, then maybe the latter have found their true value in the marketplace.”
On the day that the column was published, Campaign Against Antisemitism asked that the newspaper apologise, remove the column and end its relationship with Mr Myers, which the Sunday Times did almost immediately.
At a meeting on Tuesday between leaders of Campaign Against Antisemitism and senior managers of the Sunday Times, it was explained how processes have been tightened to preventfurther publication of such material. .
The newspaper’s management was transparent about how the article came to be published, and though it should not have slipped through the editorial process, we now understand how it did. We are satisfied that processes have been improved and we are grateful to the Sunday Times for being so open with us. Consequently we are withdrawing our complaints with the Independent Press Standards Organisation and the Irish Press Ombudsman.
Though this matter had an unhappy beginning, we are very pleased by the outcome and the message that it sends that the Sunday Times will not tolerate antisemitism.