Columnist Fired For Saying High-Paid Female BBC Journalists Earn More Because They're Jewish

Updated | The Irish edition of The Sunday Times, owned by Fox News CEO Rupert Murdoch, has pulled an article that said the two highest-earning female broadcasters at the BBC managed to secure better pay because they were Jewish.

The opinion piece by columnist Kevin Myers was entitled "Sorry, ladies - equal pay has to be earned," and discussed the pay of presenters at the U.K. public broadcaster the BBC, including TV presenter Claudia Winkleman and radio host Vanessa Feltz.

Noting that the pair were among the broadcaster's two best paid stars, Myers wrote, "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."

The article was pulled from the newspaper's website, and its editor apologized "unreservedly," for the offense caused with readers demanding the newspaper and other News Corp titles refuse to employ Myers in the future.

A spokesperson for The Sunday Times later said: "Further to our earlier statement we can confirm that Kevin Myers will not write again for The Sunday Times Ireland. A printed apology will appear in next week's paper."

'The Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens has also apologized personally to Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz for these unacceptable comments both to Jewish people and to women in the workplace."

The Campaign Against anti-Semitism has made a formal complaint about the article to British press regulator Ipso.

The article focused on controversy over the higher payment received by male stars at the BBC.

In the article, Myers also argued that male presenters may earn more because they "work harder, get sick less frequently and seldom get pregnant."

Myers has previously declared himself a Holocaust denier in a 2009 article for 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," he wrote. "These two statements of mine are irrefutable truths, yet their utterance could get me thrown in the slammer in half the countries of the EU."

It is not the first time the publication has been accused of anti-Semitism, with Murdoch apologizing in 2013 when the The Sunday Times published a cartoon by artist Gerald Scarfe showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall cemented with the blood of Palestinians.

Mr Murdoch said on Twitter: "Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of The Sunday Times. Nevertheless, we owe [a] major apology for [the] grotesque, offensive cartoon." He has not commented on the Myers column.

Murdoch is the owner of News Corp, which owns U.K. publications including The Sunday Times, as well as 21st Century Fox, which owns right-wing U.S. news broadcaster Fox News.

This article has been updated to reflect that Kevin Myers no longer works for the paper and later statements put out by the Sunday Times. Additionally, the story has been updated to clarify that Myers was a writer for the Ireland edition of the Sunday Times.