Yahoo News Vanessa Feltz reacts to 'racist Sunday Times column'
Vanessa Feltz is ‘extremely upset’ after reading Kevin Myers’s column in the Sunday Times newspaper which claimed she is paid more than other women in her profession because she is Jewish.
The Irish journalist and writer caused shock and outrage when he wrote about the BBC’s on-going gender pay-gap dispute and said that Feltz and her fellow BBC presenter Claudia Winkleman are paid more because they refuse to sell their services for less as Jewish people.
He noted: ‘Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price.’
The age-old anti-Semitic trope claims Jews are better at handling money matters, and commenting on his ‘obviously racist’ remarks, Vanessa pointed out that the column should never have gone to print.
She said during her BBC Radio London show today: ‘I would have thought after all these years I’d be immune or used to it, but that’s not at all how I felt. I felt extremely upset.
‘The apologies are all very well but how did it end up in the paper in the first place?’
Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens apologised for the piece, headlined ‘Sorry, ladies – equal pay has to be earned’, and the newspaper confirmed Myers would never write again for the title.
Ivens said: ‘The comments in a column by Kevin Myers in today’s Irish edition of The Sunday Times were unacceptable and should not have been published.
‘It has been taken down and we sincerely apologise both for the remarks and the error of judgement that led to publication.’
It’s not the first time Myers has made offensive remarks in his column. He previously got in trouble when he wrote in the Irish Independent: ‘There was no holocaust (or Holocaust, as my computer software insists) and six million Jews were not murdered by the Third Reich. These two statements of mine are irrefutable truths.’
Myers defended his writing before, saying it is not his job to be ‘balanced.’
He told Seomraranga.com: ‘ I am not a news reporter. I am a columnist. My job is to give people my opinions. It is not to be balanced. It is not to say “On the one hand……….but on the other.’
READ MORE
Rod Stewart gives group of disabled kids £25000: ‘I have to do something’
Neil Morrissey hated working on BBC’s Waterloo Road
Jennifer Aniston is making a TV comeback
Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for all of the latest celebrity gossip.
