Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn is a Canadian author and a radio, television, and on-line presenter. He has written several books, including The New York Times bestsellers America Alone, After America, and Broadway Babies Say Goodnight. In the US he has guest-hosted the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show, as well as Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, on which he regularly appeared as a guest and fill-in host.
In 2021, Steyn began hosting his own show on British news channel GB News. He left GB News in early February 2023, saying that the channel wanted him to pay fines issued by the UK media regulator Ofcom, which was investigating complaints of COVID-19 vaccination scepticism aired on The Mark Steyn Show. He has since moved his show to his own website.
Early life
Steyn was baptized a Catholic and was later confirmed in the Anglican Church, which he left to become a Baptist. He has stated that "the last Jewish female in my line was one of my paternal great-grandmothers" and that "both my grandmothers were Catholic". His parents were married in Elliot Lake, Ontario. Steyn's great-aunt was artist Stella Steyn. His mother's family was Belgian.Steyn was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, the same school that author J.R.R. Tolkien attended and where Steyn was assigned a Greek dictionary that had also been used by Tolkien. Although it was reported by The Age in 2006 that Steyn had left school at age 16, his name appears in the King Edward's School yearbook for 1977-78 as a member of "Cl.VI", that is, the "Classics 6th form", which is the normal final year for students at that school.
Career
Steyn worked as a disc jockey before becoming musical theatre critic at the newly established The Independent in 1986. He acted as TV critic for Channel 4's breakfast show The Channel 4 Daily and was appointed film critic for The Spectator in 1992. After writing predominantly about the arts, Steyn shifted his focus to political commentary and wrote a column for The Daily Telegraph, a conservative broadsheet, until 2006.He has written for many publications, including The Washington Post, The Jerusalem Post, Orange County Register, Chicago Sun-Times, National Review, The New York Sun, The Australian, Maclean's, The Irish Times, National Post, The Atlantic, Western Standard, and The New Criterion. He subsequently stepped back from writing and now devotes most of his time to his show.
Steyn's books include Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now, a history of the musical theatre, and the political America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, a New York Times bestseller which predicts the downfall of the West. He has also published collections of his columns and celebrity obituaries, as well as profiles from The Atlantic.
Steyn held a Eugene C. Pulliam Visiting Fellowship in Journalism at Hillsdale College in spring 2013. As of 2010, Steyn was no longer the back-page columnist for the print edition of National Review, conservative writer James Lileks having taken over that space. Steyn's back-page column for National Review, "Happy Warriors", resumed with the issue of March 21, 2011.
Steyn has contributed to the blog Ricochet.com and recorded numerous podcasts with the organization.
From December 2016 to February 2017, Steyn hosted The Mark Steyn Show on the CRTV Digital Network. CRTV abruptly cancelled the show after two months and went to arbitration, with both sides claiming breach of contract. Steyn also sued to keep the show on the air during arbitration, saying it was on behalf of his employees. Former show supervisor Mike Young called this "bullshit" when quoted in The Daily Beast. Former employees provided sworn declarations that Steyn was "incredibly disorganised", tyrannical, and impossible to work with. Steyn was awarded damages for breach of contract, which was confirmed on appeal, as well as attorneys' fees.
In October 2021, Steyn began covering for Nigel Farage on his prime time show Farage on GB News on Fridays and was a relief presenter for Farage on other days. On November 19, 2021, Steyn received a permanent prime time host billing on GB News, with the Friday show renamed Mark Steyn. In January 2022, the show began airing five nights a week, Monday to Friday, which in February was reduced to Monday to Thursday. In March 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Steyn presented the show from Western Ukraine.
In December 2022, Steyn suffered a heart attack while broadcasting the Mark Steyn Show on GB News TV. He did not recognise the symptoms as a heart attack, but later suffered a second, while in France, where he was hospitalised.
Steyn quit GB News in February 2023, in protest at the channel wanting to change his contract to make him personally liable for any fines issued by the UK's media regulator Ofcom, which was then investigating 411 complaints from viewers about Covid vaccine scepticism aired on Steyn's show, in potential breach of the Broadcasting Code. Steyn also complained changes in his contract would force him and his staff to attend regulatory compliance training sessions, which he referred to as "re-education classes".
On 6 March 2023, Steyn was found by Ofcom to have breached its rules during a GB News programme about COVID-19 vaccines. Ofcom said the Steyn programme had "presented a materially misleading interpretation of official data without sufficient challenge or counterweight".
Positions
Criticism of the news media
In a May 2004 column, Steyn commented that editors were encouraging anti-Bush sentiments after the Daily Mirror and The Boston Globe had published faked pictures, which originated on American and Hungarian pornographic Web sites, of British and American soldiers supposedly sexually abusing Iraqis. Steyn argued that the media only wanted to show images to Westerners "that will shame and demoralize them."In a July 2005 column for National Review, Steyn criticized Andrew Jaspan, then the editor of The Age, an Australian newspaper. Jaspan was offended by Douglas Wood, an Australian kidnapped and held hostage in Iraq, who after his rescue referred to his captors as "arseholes." Jaspan claimed that "the issue is really largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive." Steyn argued that there is nothing at all wrong with insensitivity toward murderous captors, and that it was Jaspan, not Wood, who suffered from Stockholm syndrome. He said further, "A blindfolded Mr. Wood had to listen to his captors murder two of his colleagues a few inches away, but how crude and boorish would one have to be to hold that against one's hosts?"
Conrad Black trial
Steyn wrote articles and maintained a blog for Maclean's covering the 2007 business fraud trial of his financial patron Conrad Black in Chicago, from the point of view of one who was adamantly convinced Black never committed any crime. Doing this, he later wrote, "cost me my gig at the Sun-Times" and "took me away from more lucrative duties such as book promotion". Steyn expressed dismay at "the procedural advantages the prosecution enjoys—the inducements it's able to dangle in order to turn witnesses that, if offered by the defence, would be regarded as the suborning of perjury; or the confiscation of assets intended to prevent an accused person from being able to mount a defence; or the piling on of multiple charges which virtually guarantees that a jury will seek to demonstrate its balanced judgment by convicting on something. All that speaks very poorly for the federal justice system."After Black's conviction, Steyn published a long essay in Maclean's about the case, strongly criticizing Black's defense team.
Muslim immigration views
Steyn opposes Muslim immigration to the United States, which he describes as dangerous. According to Steyn, the West faces a choice "between liberty and mass Muslim immigration."Steyn believes that if mass Muslim migration to Europe is not stopped, Europe will turn into what he calls "Eurabia", a future society where the European continent will be dominated by Islam. He has written: "much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear in our lifetimes, including many, if not most Western European countries."
In his book America Alone, Steyn likened Europe to Bosnia in the lead-up to its civil war and genocide:
When some critics claimed that Steyn was advocating genocide in this passage, he wrote:
Steyn has written about Muslim demographic projections to back up Bat Ye'or's Eurabia theory and has been on the board of advisors of the International Free Press Society, both key components of the international counter-jihad movement. In 2012, he also participated in the international counter-jihad conference in Brussels, billed as the "International Conference for Free Speech & Human Rights".