Connect: As I've been a recent target of Kevin Myers in his Irishman's Diary (February 1st) what follows in this column may be considered dubiously motivated. That's for readers to judge. On Wednesday, as the row raged over his contemptuous "bastards", "mothers of bastards" and "cash-crop whelping" remarks, I declined a radio station's invitation to discuss the matter.
Naturally I saw an opportunity to stick in the boot and of course it was tempting . . . very tempting. After all, here was, for me, the prat on a plate. However, as any comments of mine would be lost in the unprecedented din of that day's media on media, a cooler appraisal of the furore - in print and more distant from the heat of battle - seems more useful.
Apart from providing for a more considered response, a calm approach seems wisest because the controversy still contains many unexamined issues critical for journalism. Among them is the fact that the language of invective - colourful, lurid and prurient - is invariably more engrossing than the language of reason. Used carelessly however, it's simply verbal pornography.
Myers's tirades have for years seemed verbally pornographic to me although, in fairness, they have sometimes been witty. But his typically pompous tone, extended hyperboles, booming inaccuracies, contemptuous dismissals and anachronistic metaphors, though relished by some people, amount, I believe, to an ugly form of braying in print. That is, of course, a subjective judgment.
In Tuesday's infamous column he typically sneered at the "usual verbal repertoire of the politically correct". After that, his own usual verbal repertoire quickly sank below even its customary braying. It's a favourite tactic of journalists like Myers and his defender Mary Ellen Synon to label anything they wish to thrash - often including decency - "politically correct" and then fire ahead.
Well, again let's be fair and acknowledge that everybody has different techniques of building an argument. However, what's astonishing to me in the Myers/Synon type of stuff is its apparent delusion that it carries some sort of redeeming Dionysian energy. This, it trills, is the stuff that speaks for the dynamic individual hampered by having to endure life among the common herd.
Maybe it does and perhaps I just don't get it. By the way, I don't know Kevin Myers; in fact, I've never met him. I'm sure he doesn't lie awake regretting this lack of acquaintance and neither do I. That, I think, is fair enough. Indeed in the media, it can be better not to know too many other media people if you value engaging in free speech. Association, after all, naturally complicates response.
Anyway, it's obvious that certain cloying forms of political correctness warrant questioning. But does the notion routinely deserve contempt? Myers used maximum disdain to dismiss "political correctness"; Synon defended him by speaking of the "howling mob". It all begs one simple question: who the hell do they think they are to treat people with such hideous hauteur and contempt?
Often when such journalism gets particularly testy, objectors are told to "lighten up", that "it's only a game", not to "take it too seriously". That can be reasonable advice to the excessively effete or anaemic but it can never be a principle. The problem, it seems to me, is that shock-jock controversialists come to believe they have a right to insult people and call it free speech.
Well, debates over the limits of free speech have already been aired. Indeed, by Wednesday night Vincent Browne had largely shifted the debate from what Myers had written to his "right" to write it. Such debates remain interminable so it was no surprise when Browne said that in eight years of his radio programme he had never seen as great a response on any issue.
There are no simple answers. Browne spoke of John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty (1869). He rightly said that Mill recommended that even the most outrageous abuses of free speech are best defeated by rational argument. He didn't add however that Mill distinguished between offence and harm. Whether Myers was merely offensive or genuinely harmful is a judgment call open to disagreement.
Anyway, back to the language of invective. It's undeniable that measured language cannot attract like the more offensive stuff. As a result, editors use tough-writing hacks because they flog papers. Thus the business of the media is conflated with the function of journalism and even journalists in, wait for it . . . "the real world" sneer at the notion of journalistic ethics.
Surely, it's an oxymoron, they say. Actually, it's not if you contextualise everything within this "real world" where flogging papers is the name of the game - the business. The invasions of privacy, Brit-style muck-raking and Myers/Synon style nastiness are pursued to flog papers, not to further journalism.
As such, it's a complete failure of business ethics, albeit hiding behind the notion of debased journalism, that's the issue. Like the tribunals, follow the money trail and you'll get your culprit. The problem is that rogue behaviour - dangerously hurtful if colourful belligerence often succeeds in journalism - because profits demand that it be so.