Kevin Myers was the inevitable result of a press culture that trades on shock

What is the optimal level of shock? Every week, in some bland broadsheet or trashfire tabloid, a middle-aged male sadsack lines up the sacred cows of political correctness, shoots them (“in front of their families,” as Jeremy Clarkson might have it), and awaits the scandalised response with a cheeky smirk.

It could be Rod Liddle propounding the weakness of the female sex, Clarkson gleefully punning about “slopes,” or Toby Young slyly suggesting that not enough straight, white men are rewarded at the Oscars.

It could be Howard Jacobson wondering whether the “Asian communities” one sees on television might “want to kill Jews”—a thought he bravely tried to express “without sounding gross”—or James Delingpole apparently saying, of an article about Suzanne Moore, that after “such a seeing-to, she'll be walking bow-legged for weeks”. Or just Richard Littlejohn, Katie Hopkins or Melanie Phillips any other week.

We, as readers, are supposed to be stunned into first amazement and then secret, titillated admiration at this weekly ritual. But not too amazed: just enough to comment on it, not enough for the reaction to cost anything. The problem is that it’s never entirely clear to your entertaining racist or sexist exactly where the lines are drawn between “jokes” and bigotry, or between that which “everyone is thinking” and that which can't be said.

This week, it was Kevin Myers who fell on the wrong side of the invisible line. Myers had written, in a now deleted article for the Sunday Times, on the gender pay gap scandal befalling the BBC. Speculating on the reasons for men being paid better, he offered that it was because men are more charismatic, hard-working and driven. Had he stopped there, it’s quite likely that the article would not have been removed.

It was his wry aside, suggesting that Claudia Winklemann and Vanessa Feltz were paid well because as Jews they were better at haggling—or, “not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price”—that resulted in the editorial climbdown. This is made clear in the apology from Frank Fitzgibbon, editor of the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, which mentioned the antisemitism but not the misogyny; as though the descent into antisemitism had disrupted normal woman-hating service.

It has been asked, quite reasonably, why on earth none of the editors saw a problem before publishing the piece. The answer is that they’ve never seen a problem with his work before or, if they did, thought the potential eyeball attention outweighed the risk. Major newspapers have been publishing Myers for years, and he has always said the same kinds of things.

Myers is one of a class of pundits who specialise in turning social misery and degradation into a source of spiteful comedy. For Myers, the Nazi judeocide is something to be cute about, a thrilling cliff-edge on which to demonstrate his intellectual daring: “there was no holocaust (or Holocaust, as my computer software insists) and six million Jews were not murdered. These two statements of mine are irrefutable truths,” he wrote in an also now-deleted article for the Irish Independent.

Of course, Myers’ boldness was a pretence: his “irrefutable truths” boiled down to pedantry over the precise numbers killed and the precise manner of their killing. But it is all too predictable to learn that this man also has a record of baiting the pro-Palestine Left as antisemitic.

He has a similar repertoire on AIDS, one of his favourite subjects for a giggle. The AIDS pandemic proved, he claimed, “that a rectum in New York could within hours be infecting one in Berlin”. Africa was “giving almost nothing to anyone—apart from AIDS”. Of course, when he finally attracts the censure he craves and courts, he delightedly decries political correctness. It is as though a monkey were to fling its faeces at you and then, spotting your distress, nod knowingly and say: “touched a nerve, didn’t I?”

We live in an age in which there is a great deal of moral panic about online abuse. It isn’t moral panic because there is no such abuse, but because the focus on social media is a type of displacement and scapegoating. National newspapers have been commodifying racist, sexist and homophobic spite and bullying for years. They have created a decrepit caste of ghastly celebrities, whose fame is built entirely on who they victimise for a living. And as we are learning, the broadsheets are often no better than the tabloids—indeed, by offering a patina of legitimacy to boorish and self-serving sadists, they may be even worse.

Yet the newspapers and news broadcasters, globally, are in decline. Audiences are falling, revenues are falling and, crucially, trust in journalists and outlets— even the broadsheets—has plummeted. The age of the Internet, signalling the decline of six hundred years of print culture, has also ended the ideological monopolies of print empires. As the British press discovered to its cost at the last election, this process is much more accelerated here than elsewhere. The fact that even the ‘serious’ press makes much of its coin out of such mediocre malice, is one reason why.