Mark Steyn, the former GB News presenter, has taken Ofcom to court accusing it of “killing his career” after he questioned Covid vaccines on air, with the regulator saying his programmes caused “harm to viewers”. The Telegraph has more.
The presenter left GB News after the media regulator found two of his programmes, which featured discussions about the vaccine rollout, breached its guidelines.
Mr Steyn, 64, has asked a High Court judge to quash the decisions, claiming they had a “chilling effect”.
Speaking in court for Mr Steyn on June 10th, his lawyer Jonathan Price said: “The rulings against his show have killed his career, killed his career in the U.K. and given rise to what he describes as crude defamation… recycled through the London papers as if they had the force of criminal convictions.”
Canadian presenter Mr. Steyn joined GB News in 2021 but left in 2023, claiming that it wanted him to pay fines to Ofcom after the rulings against him.
Ofcom had found that on April 21st 2022 statistics from the U.K. Health Security Agency were presented in a “materially misleading way” in a broadcast which received four complaints.
It ruled that the show incorrectly “provided definitive evidence of a causal link between receiving a third COVID-19 vaccine and higher infection, hospitalisation and death rates”.
The presentation was made without sufficient counterweight and was found to be a potential “harm to viewers”.
Ofcom also took issue with a broadcast on Oct 4th 2022, when Mr. Steyn interviewed U.S. author Naomi Wolf during a show which received more than 400 complaints from viewers.
Ms. Wolf claimed that the vaccine rollout was akin to “mass murder”, and comparable to the actions of “doctors in pre-Nazi Germany”.
Ofcom ruled this amounted to “an unchallenged conspiracy theory”, and Ms. Wolf’s unopposed claims were a “harm to viewers”.
Worth reading in full.
Kathy Gyngell has written a fulsome defence of Steyn over on TCW Defending Freedom, calling him “the finest, the most talented and acute of journalists and broadcasters to have graced our TV screens in recent years”. On Covid vaccine harms he was the “only broadcaster doing his job”.
Vindication if anymore were needed came just weeks after the ruling. Evidence after evidence has since continued to emerge of Covid vaccines’ harms. Senior figures have joined Professor Dalgleish’s call for all mRNA vaccines to be banned, such are the risks. The ONS has been found to have lied about its vaccines safety and efficacy claims.
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