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RTÉ’s MORNING IRELAND was ‘unfair’ in describing journalist Kevin Myers as a Holocaust denier, according to a decision on a complaint by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI).
The decision was officially arrived at last Thursday.
A complaint by a member of the public had been lodged with the BAI concerning a statement made by a presenter on the flagship RTÉ weekday programme in late July 2017, which saw Myers referred to as a ‘Holocaust denier’.
That assertion stems from a series of articles written by the columnist in 2009 for the Belfast Telegraph and Irish Independent newspapers, in which he took umbrage with the application of the word ‘Holocaust’ with regard to the genocide of European Jews during World War II.
In those articles, Myers referred to himself as a “Holocaust denier”, with his chief issue being the use of the original Greek word itself, stating that there was no single ‘holocaust’ as the genocide in question took many forms.
The complainant asserted that Myers was not disputing that genocide had taken place, merely the semantic implications of the word ‘Holocaust’ itself, and cited a number of references on Myers’ behalf that had been made in the aftermath of the furore, including by the Jewish Representative Council.
Distortion
They also said that no senior member of the Irish Jewish community has described Myers as a ‘denier’, and that to describe the writer as such would amount to ‘an absolute distortion of the facts’.
“The complainant adds that Mr Myers has written many times about the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jews and that it is ridiculous and offensive to label him as (a) ‘Holocaust denier’,” the decision reads.
The 2009 article had come to the fore at the time as a result of Myers writing (and subsequently losing his job with the Sunday Times over) a column dealing with the gender pay gap seen at the BBC, with particular reference to Jewish female presenters Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz.
In defending the complaint, RTÉ stated that in describing Myers as such its presenter was merely using “Mr Myers’ own words”.
“The broadcaster maintains that if he is being referred to around the world as a Holocaust denier, it is because he described himself as such,” the broadcaster’s response reads.
In considering the complaint, the BAI had regard to the obligations set out in its own code of fairness, objectivity and impartiality, which require the presentation of “views and fact in a way which does not misrepresent those views or facts or render them misleading”.
“It was the opinion of the committee that these obligations had not been met in the broadcast,” the BAI said.
While noting that Mr Myers had described himself as a ‘Holocaust denier’ in a typically provocative newspaper article that he had written, it was evident from the article as a whole that his description did not in fact amount to a statement denying the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazi regime.
Rather, the article was a comment on how language is used and the criminalisation of individuals or groups who engage in Holocaust denial.
The BAI considered that the presenter’s description of Myers was “considered to lack fairness to (Myers) and… misrepresented his views in a manner which would likely mislead audiences as to his views”.
Accordingly, the authority decided to uphold the complaint.
The full decision can be read here
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Correct decision. Morning Ireland either didnt do their homework on Myers, or thought it would be a good occasion to stick the boot in.
@Honeybadger197: It is RTE so both are fairly plausible reasons.
@BrianMcB: True
Myers is an absolute gent and an intellectual
@frank murphy: I met him once and found him affable, though I probably disagree with him on 80% of issues (especially re: 1916, the North etc.). But I found the media campaign mounted against him unfair and vindictive. In general, I see that certain people with non-p.c. views have been hounded out of the public space e.g. George Hook for example. Ring leader is Irish Times resident philosopher and media darling, Fintan O’Toole. Deep down, he is a smug self-satisfied authoritarian and he doesn’t waste an opportunity to silence people he finds distasteful. I see a lot of contradictions in his line of thinking on many matters, but the Irish media has a herd mentality group-think on social issues, economics, Europe etc. We had a crazy property boom that ended in catastrophe and massive bank bailouts, austerity. Our economy improved and the whole nasty business has receded into the background, the media is now basking in the glow of Ireland being the centre of the Earth after Brexit. Meanwhile, we have a skyrocketing property market and they are talking about more visas for the restaurant sector. The economic shambles of the last decade is indicative of a failure of our media to act as anything other than a mouthpiece for Leo Varadkar.
Myers has been vindicated. I know he’s not a Holocaust-denier but he did himself no favours by using a certain stereotype about Jewish people.
@Ciarán Masterson: didn’t he also say that “Bloody Sunday” never happened, that British troops did not enter Croke park and open fire on the crowd… he Got a free pass on that one many years ago…. no social media to challenge him , and no one in a position to would because he drank in the same circles ..
@Gerry Campbell: your persecution complex runs deep
@Gerry Campbell: He also said the nazis were socialists. after they wiped out the trade union movement and the communist party?
@frank murphy: well frank did he say that or not, see how deep my aul memory runs , and if he did , what was he smoking at the time .
Not a big fan of Myers but reading him for years in Irish Times it was obvious he was not a holocaust denier.
Some vindication for him. Its laughable that Myers seems to be now seen as an anti-semite afters years of urging us to be more pro-israel
@Dave O’Hanlon: Because he used an anti-Semitic stereotype in his writing? He only has himself to blame.
@Dave O’Hanlon: i never understand why Irish people seem so interested in israel and arab problems over the years, and we at each other throats in Ireland over religions , mid -east never commented on ira etc..jus sayin
@andrew: I think Myers’ comments were inappropriate.. The likes of himself and George Hook have been pushing themselves further and further over the line of decency, and persistently doing it for years now. They are lost & scared as they find themselves in a different world to when they started out in journalism (I use the term loosely for Hook’s wild hyperbolic rantings) and that frustration & insecurity has seen both of them go over the edge of the cliff. Thankfully we have a more tolerant society than that of the 70′s and 80′s when they were in their youth. Of course they will have defenders from the same era and slightly younger far-right fundamentalists who robotically scream ‘freedom of speech’ as if that is the ends of any analysis on decency. We’re better off without both of them.
@Royston Fitzpatrick: snowflakes don’t like opinion
@Pat Butler: Not sure how you could either quantify, qualify or prove that one-liner.
@Pat Butler: once you use that nonsense term, snowflake, you’ve lost the argument.
@Royston Fitzpatrick:
It’s their USP – there’s a good market in being controversial, but it doesn’t mean that’s what they genuinely believe.
@Royston Fitzpatrick: and who decides where this line of decency lies? Surely the market consumes what the market wants, and your subjective definition of what constitutes decency remains irreverent. By that measure they both still enjoy sizeable listenership/readership.
@Dermot Lane: no argument about it. Just my opinion!
Meyers comments were both accurate and factual, nothing to apologize for, hence the reason he didnt apologize
@Royston Fitzpatrick: i read the ST every sunday for years i was saying to myself what is he talking about against women jew setc and he is prone to be weird .. i am happy he is gone now if they can dump hooke and dunphy off the media in ireland i will be happy….
Some admirers of Kevin Myers’s writings in books and newspapers are members of the Jewish faith, and they have said so, even though a short contrarian article he wrote for the Oirish version of the Sunday Times drew fire when it mentioned the moneymaking abilities of Jews.
In the Old Testament in some places people are described as ‘offering holocausts’ to God in expiation for sins or when praying for favours. This meant that they solemnly sacrificed farm animals and/or crops and fruit. (In Hong Kong and South China today tourists can enter some restaurants and see fruit and vegetables symbolically offered by the management at a shrine to Buddhist or Taoist saints.) Obviously to me, Myers was calling attention to varying meanings of the Greek word holocaust. The term The Holocaust meaning the industrial extermination of 6 million Jews in the nazi death camps in the 1940s, did not gain currency in American and British English until sometime in the 1970s. We know today that the nazi machine also systematically murdered 5 million other categories of ‘undesirable’ human beings – the mentally and physically handicapped, Polish priests and other nationalist leaders, Gypsies, homosexuals, social democrats, communists, German clergy who uttered moral criticism of nazi ideology and others.
I don’t warm to the contrarian journalism style of Kevin Myers, but feel that when he wrote his last Sunday Times article a lot of journalists in Irish media took the opportunity to pounce on him because they didn’t like his expressed opinions on other topics closer to home. I think I detected a herd mentality at play then.
@Garreth Byrne: I think that it was journalists in the UK and members of the Jewish community over there who attacked him. The Irish media basically just reported it with the exception of the radio programme.
@Des Hanrahan: I disagree that the Irish media ‘just reported it’. Individual columnists in the daily and weekend newspapers made their opinions clear about the dismissal of Myers from the ST. They agreed with it.
@Garreth Byrne: The herd mentality was at play when George Hook lost his job.
Right so. He repeatedly described himself as a Holocaust denier in his ludicrous excursions into semantics on the subject – motivation for which was what exactly? He also spent a lot of time and energy defending convicted Holocaust denier David Irving as a “fine historian” in the 80’s – Irving incidentally holds no qualifications as a historian whatsoever and has been convicted in Germany and Austria for Holocaust denial. But Myers is not a Holocaust denier according to the BAI. Jolly good. Carry on so Ireland, all is well.
@Secret Agent: “motivation for which was what exactly? ” to defend Holocaust deniers from prosecution. The Holocaust by any stretch of the imagination and by historical fact (Myers is supposed to be a historian) is used to describe the Nazi genocide of Jews: First coined “—News Chronicle, 5 December 1942, UK……Holocaust… Nothing else in Hitler’s record is comparable to his treatment of the Jews . . . The word has gone forth that . . . the Jewish peoples are to be exterminated . . . The conscience of humanity stands aghast.” and yet Myers plays footsie with words and his diminishing delusional audience is in awe and his friends in the BAI are terrified to challenge him or his foolhardy and inaccurate utterances.
@Secret Agent: your view of Irving is not correct. It appears that irving is in fact quiet the expert on certain parts of nazis history. Yes he is a naxis apologist & not much of a person but he does of understanding of aspects of the wehrmacht that no one had before. He was as you say convicted in Austria of holocaust denial but if you wish to defend that conviction yourself then its better for you to explain the case. In my view his conviction was unwarranted. Im most definitely not an antisemite or holocaust denier & irving is a horrible individual. Its important though that the rest of us including the disgraceful authorities in Austria do not mirror nazis by locking up people for what they say. Im unsure of Myers so i wont comment but this type of behaviour in Austria
@Mjhint: should be condemned. My own views are further helped & backed up by Christopher Hitchens who defended irving right to hold the views he did without agreeing with any of them.
We need more like Myers in this world
@Mjhint: Not completely sure what your point is here? Irving has two failed attempts at qualification, one in Physics and one in political economics (both dropped out) and none in history. His conviction for Holocaust denial is not hard to understand as his written work overlty questions the scale and nature of the Holocaust and he claims Hitler was unaware that the genocide was happening and had no hand in ordering it. If Hutchens is the only other defender you can find for Irving’s filthy polictically motivated lies (apart from Myers) than the phrase ‘judge a man by the company he keeps’ springs to mind. If you want to know more about his fake history, lack of basic historical credabililty and convictions start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving
@Austin Rock: You appear to have correctly answered my rhetorical question here.
Kevin myres got a taste of his own medicine. ant before its time. good riddance.
@Sean Conway: And not before it’s time. that should be.
Biggest fault Myers had was telling the facts, warts and all. We Irish do not like warts.
@Sean Gordon: Half the population is warts lol.
It was “A” Holocaust,not “The” Holocaust. 50 million Native Americans,4-5 million Irish,the slaughter of South American Natives by the Conquistadors 100-150 million and many more. The difference is apart from the Zionist’s,they haven’t used it to justify the genocide of another people. The Palestinians in Gaza are being systematically wiped out and Ghettoised. It is dangerous to focus on one genocide as “The”.
@David Williamson: The Palestinian population in Gaza is, according to the UN, growing out of control, that’s some weird definition of genocide you have.
@Richard Keogh Israel must be accountable to the United Nations and international law. Israel’s use of white phosphorous is a war crime, their use of human shields is a war crime, Israel’s collective punishment of all of Gaza is a war crime, Israel’s target killing of children on a beach playing soccer is a war crime, Israel’s bombing of hospitals is a war crime. These are documented acts by UN Mission reports, independent journalists, and by admission of Israeli soldiers. Rather than ignoring these unjust acts, Israel must own up to these war crimes and immediately cease such acts. Look at life expectancy rather than death rate.
@David Williamson: Are you one of those drama queens that make the analogy between the modern state of Israel and the German Fascist state of 1933-45. So you are woefully ignorant on the crimes of WW2 Germany. Putting aside the awful genocide of 6 million, this was a totally oppressive militaristic state that oversaw and administrated in the occupied areas of Eastern and Western Europe enslaved tortured and imprisoned peoples in their millions and killed those that did not fit their perverse racial ideals.
Those of a certain faith were by far the largest group but it must also be remembered that the victims included :- Homosexuals 15,000, Mentally and Physically disabled 200,000, Soviet POWs, 3,300,000, Jehovahs Witness 5,000, Freemasons 100,000, Eastern Slavs 1,600,000, Serbs 500,000, Poles 2,000,000, Spanish Republicans 7,000. These are conservative figures and the killings of approx 12 million people was carried out over a period of 6 years.
Today these are just figures on a page the true horror of the mothers with their young children and babes in arms, being rounded up and taken to a pit for cold blooded execution by machine gun or gas chamber is almost too horrific to be imagined. While I feel compassion for the Palestinians and their plight, I fail to see even a slight comparison between the modern state of Israel and the WW2 German State. Could those that make the comparison please enlighten us.
@SteoG: Well said.
@SteoG: No 1. Prove your figures. “Drama Queen”??? Unlike you I don’t believe all the shit I’m fed. Read a bit more,you might learn something. http://balder.org/judea/Six-Million-140-Occurrences-Of-The-Word-Holocaust-And-The-Number-6,000,000-Before-The-Nuremberg-Trials-Began.php.
@Honeybadger197: Did millions of Irish die In a famine or a genocide. The history books say famine,we all know that’s a lie. People are to quick to believe propaganda,spread by those whom it suits to “Whitewash” history.
@David Williamson: It’s up to you as a sad denier to provide the proof for your silly counter factual claims. Links to lying racist webshites proves nothing, other than the fact that you will swallow anything, as long as it fits in with your warped childish point of view. It really does look like you do eat the crap your fed. Learn to read, critically, research and use your limited intelligence to best effect because based on your childish little rant there is no evidence that you have done any of the above. Time to grow up now and think for yourself David.
@SteoG: A legend in his own lunchtime!!!! A mind is a terrible thing to waste,but in your case it won’t be much of a loss.
Narcissistic attention seeker gets yet more attention….
Irish must have seen the irony on taking down Myers the single most ardent defender of Israel over last 30 years in Irish media….Fired for anti Jewish comments and won’t work again as a journalist….
I have disagreed with his boys own approach to British Imperialism for years but to be fair to call him a holocaust denier was a viscious slander. Shame on RTE.
Oh so Myres is a Holocaust denier then. Grand. He even said so himself.
@Polly Dolan: If I said I was the best footballer in the world would that make it so?
@Sean:??? Completely incomparable
Is it illegal to deny the holocaust , here in Ireland ?
@Ken Hayden: No, you’re okay Ken, you can keep telling anyone who will listen that it didn’t happen.
@Ken Hayden: No. Why you’d want to though is a different days work.
@Ken Hayden: It is not illegal to deny any historical fact here in Ireland. You can be an Armenian genocide denier, An Gorta Mór denier, a Moon landing denier or even a new Earth creationist and science denier.
@SteoG: We even tolerate Climate Change Deniers, and Lord Lucan-is-alive- and-hiding-out-near-Cahirciveen Deniers.
Myers certainly was hoisred on his own petard. He tangled with the wrong lobby.
How did myers get away so long with all his opinionated horseshit ,he loved walking the red line in order to sell a few extra copies ,he had an entertainment value and that was about it ,he could have been a great journalist ,but there was some form of self loathing and that s what finished him in the end .he should have seen a shrink years ago .
@Anthony Gallagher: agreed. his own aloofness and air of superiority made him thoroughly unlikable.
he lived next door to my cousins up in Phibsboro; as a neighbour he is exactly as bitter and petulant as his newspaper column persona.
“An Irishman’s diary” indeed, i always felt he was ashamed to be Irish and felt the need to remind everyone how British he would like to be in his column.
Listening to him grovel on Sean O’Rourke’s radio show was my moment of Zen
It all goes back to people who want to be nasty to others, they have to portray that person or group worse than their own actions of what they say or do in order to be nasty themselves and it excuses them then to be nasty then. As well as to demonise people they dislike in order for others to put up a psychological wall against what that person or what that group says or does then?
Sometimes they do it as well as to fit in by agreeing with the popular wave of thought at the time too but who knows when it comes to the brain washing media as all they want is the most attention they can get?
Kevin who?
Sorry Kevin you’re not a holocaust denier. You’re just a c*unt !
Whether you believe that 60 or 6,000,000 people were killed by nazis, you should be free to say it. Whether you think that 100 or 100,000,000 people were killed by Bolsheviks, you should be free to say it. End of.
Conservatives are such snowflakes. The second they’re called on their views they cry like babies.
have your say