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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solves a problem to access those large fees – and another benefit, our lecturers will be able to promote democracy to China’s up and comi…. – LOL – maybe not
It is amazing how our oh-so-careful universties can adjust their principles when money is involved.
Keeping Blairs education industry going. When my son was looking at going to uni I said no Mickey Mouse courses and no Micky Mouse Universities. (He studied Chemical Engineering at a Russell group uni).
Universities have become (more so) holding bays for the young, who self fund 3 years before going into the job market, to do a job they could of started at 16. (I was talking to somebody in the village and the grass was being cut. The person said it was his grandson cutting the grass and he had a Phd in Psychology).
there’s a growing industry in behaviour science
Indeed – we can be assured that those taking STEM courses will be free from undue influence, and deal only in a truth based on scientific method. That has been so obvius over the last 18 months. We need more versed in the critical thinking of a science and technology dominated culture.
The issue is less simple, and – as always ‘Follow the Money’ is the guide. Chinese students are BIG money, and offending the Chinese is not the road to wealth.
Why are we using our limited training capacity as an export product?
If we wish to train Chinese students, open branches in China.
But as our democratic rights are being swiftly eroded by our once Conservative government to bring about an enforced communist type regime, how useful those students will be over here to advertise the benefits of communism! What a clever ploy. The Imperial College will be delighted. I bet only the most zealous are permitted to come.
“communist type regime”
It’s just the natural (if unforseen by addicts) trajectory of the Tory addiction to capital accumulation at the expense of anything else, not the con of ‘communism’ used as a front for the same.
Some British private schools (which are increasingly abandoning the British middle class in favour of the more lucrative global elite) are indeed opening branches in China.
Let me get this straight. 2 years ago a virus escaped from China and arrived in several countries at a time corresponding to the arrival of Chinese students to universities across the world. Since then we have had universities stopping face to face tuition, because of this virus. Now we have those same universities bussing in students from that same country.
Yep…but God forbid you want a week on the Costas!
PUB’s Three Notice Process To Stop Schools Vaxxing Children
By popular and urgent demand, here lies PUB’s three notice process to deal with the clear and present threat that UK schools will be offering the experimental COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ to 12-17 year olds next month, following the JCVI’s recent u-turn on its 15/07/2021 assessment that the risk outweighed the benefits of vaxxing anybody under 18.
https://www.thebernician.net/pubs-three-notice-process-to-stop-schools-vaxxing-children/
Chinese students are welcome. Chinese politics can fuck off. The UK is not a fucking COMMUNIST country. And the politicians who are committing treason by importing Chinese Communist Party policy like lockdown and vaxpass and credit scores etc, well please fuck off to China and live your fucking dream there you dirty traitorous pieces of filth. These scumbags better pay for these crimes.
CCP and Tory Party = different guises in differing contexts for grabbing the boodle and the power. Simple.
Academia hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party. Bought and laid for.
Meanwhile, the CCP exploits the Chinese peoplemas slave labour and kills Christians.
How many of these ‘students’ are CCP operatives? What about stealing our IPR?
None of this matters, only the need for Vice Chancellors to top up their obscene salaries and promote their woke agendas.
It’s known as unregulated ‘global capitalism’ – favoured by both the Tories and Labour since 1980 and that ludicrous figure with the handbag.
And the university most closely linked with China is… yes, Imperial.
Hello Mr.Ferguson
How does Ferguson manage ordering from a chinese menu?
…I’ll have 200,000 Number 54,000’s please.
Are you sure?
Of course I am! My computer model says so.
Okay. Do you want wafers with that?
Course I don’t want f’ing wafers…… (copyright Monty Python)
Daughter of a friend of mine, in New Zealand, was a student recruitment officer and flew in and out of China, recruiting, on behalf of the Catholic school she worked for. She’s been NZ bound for a while now so not sure what is going to happen there.
A friendly reminder to British students: You’re forced to wear face masks etc because it is conjectured that it will help with attracting and maintaining a sizable number of these guys who are much more important than you because more money is (reportedly) to be made of that.
Aren’t Chinese people in the uk quite successful compared to other groups eg white working class boys and BME? Yet another means of infiltration and turning the indigenous population into second class citizens?
There were a lot of Chinese students at my university 20 years ago. I have absolutely no idea how they passed anything though as none of them could speak a word of intelligible English. I don’t mean that to sound small-minded, I’m all for studying abroad but I can’t imagine doing it without a decent grasp of the language. I just kinda assumed that the Uni didn’t mind when they were paying so much. It was super annoying to have to attempt to work with any of them on anything that wasn’t in the universal language of maths though.
Well, lots of valuable products are made in China these days – including the students, with related cash flow for the universities. Not necessarily beneficial to our local people, though.
Get the CCP sleepers topped up
Fascinating. So universities are able to organise chartered flights for their Chinese students.. but large food organisations in the country cannot organise drivers to deliver food to Uk shops. Yes, this makes complete sense.
And the wealth of China comes from energy generated largely by coal with a sizable amount of nuclear and environmentally disruptive Hydro. It’s a funny old world and will be even funnier if the Taliban turn up at COP26. How will the XR supporting and woke universities square any of this?
When we are constantly under economic and security threats from the Chinese, we import this vast army of Chinese students with obvious non-west allegiance, just to earn a buck? Are we utterly barking mad?
Just another way the East is winning and we are losing. When it becomes all about money this happens.
World peace may be great, we’ll never know it. Why is it bad to recognise that we have enemies.
So they fly in Chinese students who then have to sit in the rooms remotely accessing courses? They could do that from China.
The treatment of students during the government’s pandemic shows that universities are not “centres of learning”. The insistence on mask wearing proves that.