Following two (mercifully non-fatal) heart attacks late last year, the recovering, indomitable Mark Steyn was then placed in a position by his then employer, GB News, where he was forced to resign.
The long-time “niche Canadian” – as he was described by The Guardian – independent journalist and “global content provider” was the victim of the social media-Ofcom industrial complex. Ofcom is the United Kingdom’s media and communications regulator, and is a paid-up member of the Covid class. And not just a Covid class leader. Ofcom states:
Promoting equity, diversity and inclusion in broadcasting is a priority for Ofcom, and we are working with the industry to make progress.
Unfortunately, Ofcom doesn’t believe in the inclusion of those who question the core elements of the elites’ Covid narrative. Instead, Ofcom goes after them. Banging on about how inclusive they are bespeaks a clear lack of awareness of irony. It is so with many of these pretend, do-gooding agencies of government. Here is Ofcom’s stated policy on Covid “misinformation”:
In these challenging times, people understandably want to keep up to date with the latest developments in the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.
But given the false claims about Covid-19 circulating online, some people are struggling to know who or what to believe.
Access to accurate, trustworthy and credible sources of news and information has never been more important. So, with the support of Ofcom’s Making Sense of Media Panel and Network, we’ve collected a set of resources to help cut through the confusion and provide people with the tools to navigate news and information about Covid-19.
Many of these focus on debunking common misconceptions or harmful claims about the coronavirus. But there are also some useful tips on how to seek out reliable content, how to tell fact from fiction, and how to find out who’s behind particular claims to help us all to ‘share’ information responsibly.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/media-literacy-research/coronavirus-resources
Shades of Jacinda Ardern. Our truth is the only truth.
We will criminalise anyone who dares to differ. Shut them down. Ofcom is in the business of totalitarian narrative protection, and it doesn’t take prisoners. And the forces of the PGGWC (progressive, green, globalist, woke, Covid) class know it. They know all the pressure points and the Ofcom buttons to press, and they are allowed to get away with it.
Steyn had dared to interview, on his massively popular prime time program, a number of victims of Covid vaccine injuries. He remains just about the only commentator in Britain (along with TCW Defending Freedom) to have placed vaccine harms under the microscope. Thank God he has. A few other champions have, but literally no one in the mainstream media has dared to go there, so bought up have they been by what Woody Harrelson has correctly referred to as a “drugs cartel”. Bill Gates has paid hundreds of millions to media companies, and Big Pharma has been said to have bought up three quarters of the media’s total advertising.
The rest of the story for Steyn is tediously familiar. Steyn’s opponents got together to arrange a complaint to Ofcom, and it duly agreed to investigate Steyn. Media proprietors can be fined huge amounts for breaching Ofcom directives. Lose their licences.
Then GB News decided to make Steyn’s new contract conditional upon him agreeing to pay any future Ofcom fines himself. He walked. For the Covidista class, it was “mission accomplished”. The familiar playbook. GB news lost its star attraction, and Steyn now produces his show himself. I believe he has more viewers now than he did with GB News. So, perhaps NOT a cancellation after all. The indefatigable Steyn tends to bounce back from his periodic run-ins with the corporate-right establishment, heart attacks notwithstanding.
GB News has confirmed its role as a limited hangout for the Covid State. The limited hangout has been defined as follows:
There is a term of art in politics and among intelligence professionals that is known as the “limited hangout.” Whenever one’s veil of secrecy is penetrated, spies or politicians can employ misdirection to distract the public. The technique involves disclosing a self-contained and sensational but relatively benign story to overshadow something more damaging. It’s a non-confession, with the agency or individual seeming to “lay all the cards on the table,” and assuage concerns that anyone is trying to hide anything. Upon learning the “truth” as presented, the public is mollified and moves on with no real scrutiny of note, missing the real story altogether.
GB News management made its choices. It has sided with the Covid establishment and against truth-telling. It values Ofcom endorsement and Covid safety over journalism. It has given the tick to the rat cunning of the social media operatives who went after its star host.
The Steyn affair has caused a few ructions in the right-of-centre commentariat. Toby Young, career Spectator columnist, creator of the admirable Lockdown Sceptics and the equally admirable Free Speech Union, was a frequent guest on the Steyn GB News show. But he hasn’t taken up the Steyn cause, putting it mildly.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/mark-steyn-and-the-free-speech-question/
Fence sitting, n’est pas?
Steyn wrote a letter to The Spectator, as follows:
Dear Sir,
You're entitled to your opinion, as they used to say, even in Britain. And Toby Young is entitled to his, regarding my recent departure from GB News. However, I was struck by his summation of my show:
'Great television, but not always Ofcom-compliant television.'
How does he know this? Ofcom, the grisly UK media regulator, has been 'investigating' me for a year and has reached no such determination. They have launched three 'investigations' into the show. The first they abandoned: I beat the rap. The second has been running since April and the third since October. Toby's breezy assertion of my guilt is clearly prejudicial.
Given his confidence in my non-compliance, perhaps Toby would like to give Ofcom a heads-up on which rules I've broken, because they seem to be having trouble getting the goods on me – which risks giving the impression that these leisurely 'investigations' are a racket: Producers and presenters of daily TV shows are expected to confirm that they're in 'compliance' in the hours before airtime, but the fellows who wrote the rules need ten months to figure out whether I broke them?
It is odd to find Britain's supposed free-speech champ cheering GB News's decision to play Queen of Hearts – sentence first, verdict whenever. As Toby has semi-conceded elsewhere, the clause I was being asked to sign is illegal under English law, which tells you something about whether or not this was a good-faith contract negotiation. But, more importantly, on the broader free-speech question, GB News is self-censoring and conceding to Ofcom far more authority than the law demands.
Some years back, I ran into a similar situation with Canada's censorship law – Section 13, which had a conviction rate Kim Jong-Un and Saddam Hussein would envy (100 per cent). The difference then was that, unlike GB News, the suits at the corporation and our estimable QC, Julian Porter, were all in agreement on the end-game: getting the law repealed and the Canadian state out of the censorship business. It was a tough fight, but we won: on June 26th 2013 the repeal of Section 13 received Royal Assent, and that was that.
That's what should happen to Ofcom's powers over editorial content.
It is pathetic that the General Secretary of the soi-disant Free Speech Union can make no more stirring battle-cry than 'Free speech – as long as it's approved by government regulatory bodies!'
Much, though not all, of the letter was published in The Spectator.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/letters-277/
The irrepressible James Delingpole, with no particular dog in the Steyn fight, saw it differently. He had one of his regular fights with his old friend Toby on their London Calling podcast.
You're sounding quite like you're part of the establishment there Tobes. I'm quite surprised. I mean, I always thought that that like me, you were a journalist and commentator who sort of took sides against when you saw manifest injustice, that you went for it but here you are sort of saying if Ofcom is the villain. I mean, surely there's no doubt that Ofcom is the villain. I mean never mind how....I agree with your with your point that GB News has been bullied into this position. But here we have what is essentially the bully boy arm of an increasingly unaccountable, authoritarian state, which is using....which is deploying powers of censorship, that one hitherto would not have expected to see outside the Soviet Union or in Mao's China or whatever. We're living in England, Tobes, we're not living behind the Iron Curtain. And yet, here is this organization, Ofcom, with this sort of slightly sinister, Orwellian name, deciding that that no, no broadcaster, no broadcaster that wants to be on TV, of any kind, even if even if it's a sort of niche channel for sort of skeptical people like I suppose GB News wanted to be. Not even GB News, apparently, is now allowed to report on probably the most pressing issue facing our country today, in that lots and lots of people have been injured by vaccines, which they weren't, which aren't even vaccines, that they were encouraged to take by government bullying campaign. And they've now suffered injury, a significant number of them, a proportion of them, have suffered injury or death. And here is the government's chief censor, saying you cannot report on this stuff. And if you do report on this stuff, we are going to make sure that the person who does it is going to get censured and lose his job. That seems to me the scandal here. And the idea that you can just say, well, on the one hand and the other just seems to me, an abnegation of your responsibility. I mean, of the very things that made me want to become a journalist, speaking truth to power, but which you seem to have abandoned. I mean, I'm a bit disappointed, I have to say.
https://www.steynonline.com/13258/transcript-of-segment-on-london-calling-february
Delingpole, like Steyn, a champion in the climate wars, has also been a clear-thinking critic of the Covid State. He has called out every single one of the lies, the crimes, the demonic influences, the great reset agendas of the World Economic Forum. He has gone down the right rabbit holes, with evidence and conviction. He is “out there” at a time when all the smart people are out there. He is a truth teller and a conspiracy researcher, par excellence. He saw the Steyn play for what it was.
Steyn has pointed out that medical establishment liars have easily survived the Ofcom panopticon. They do not get “dobbed in” (of course), so they are not investigated. They continue to appear on the television to spruik their collapsing narratives. On all of the breakfast shows. Patrick Vallance’s self-serving obfuscations? Neil Ferguson’s ludicrous, failed models? None are investigated.
Ofcom is vehicle of State oppression. Nothing new there. It is a stereotypical, captured public sector organisation. And though the Covid class has not shut Steyn down – who on earth could? – it may well have shut GB News down as an effective critic of the State. It has been well and truly neutered. This is a textbook case of the cancellation business model. And until (allegedly conservative) governments wake up to the model, it will continue to be brilliantly successful.
So, we come back to the core problem.
It is the governments that we elect, not only in the UK but in Australia and other Western democracies too, that are the core problem. They do not seek to control the Ofcoms of the world. All too hard. They just let them be. That is a choice they make. We must hold them to account. If we do not, how can we complain when they lie to us, and arrange to have all their public instrumentalities collude in the lies?
A little reflection on the medical context of the Steyn/GB News cancellation is warranted here, to put his case in perspective.
Down under, the outsized spike in excess deaths continues, as does the desperate, total silence of the legacy media. It nary rates a mention, let alone an attempted explanation, outside the confines of commentators generally referred to as conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. This charge would be laughable were it not for the fact that we are talking about mass murder here.
As Steve Kirsch notes, referring to a recent (2022) peer reviewed paper by two Australian authors:
Now published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature: "The mRNA vaccines are neither safe nor effective, but outright dangerous".
A memorable line from the paper notes:
Never in vaccine history have we seen 1011 case studies showing side effects of a vaccine.
And this:
Never in Vaccine history have 57 leading scientists and policy experts released a report questioning the safety and efficacy of a vaccine. They not only questioned the safety of the current Covid-19 injections, but were calling for an immediate end to all vaccination. Many doctors and scientists around the world have voiced similar misgivings and warned of consequences due to long-term side effects. Yet there is no discussion or even mention of studies that do not follow the narrative on safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccination (Emphasis in the original).
Finally, this:
As scientists we put up hypotheses and test them using experiments. If a hypothesis is proven to be true according to current knowledge it might still change over time when new evidence comes to light. Hence, sharing and accumulating knowledge is the most important part of science. The question arises when and why this process of science has been changed. No discussion of new knowledge disputing the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines is allowed. Who gave bureaucrats the means to destroy the fundaments of science and tell scientists not to argue the science? (Emphasis in the original).
Speaking about another paper on excess deaths in Australia, by Wilson Sy, Kirsch concludes:
There are a lot of excess deaths happening in Australia.
The most likely explanation is that these deaths are being caused by the jabs.
If this is not the case, why are the Australian health authorities hiding the true cause from the people of Australia?
If this is the case, how come they aren’t pausing the jabs in the meantime until this can be sorted out?
How are they ever going to explain the excess mortality data in Australia? (substack.com)
As Kirsch says:
Every health authority in the world should be warning the public about this.
Yet anyone calling this out is liable for the sack, for silencing, for cancellation. Excess deaths. The use of dangerous, indeed, lethal, end-of-life drugs in hospitals and care homes. The suspension of normal health care, with deadly consequences. Disabilities resulting from vaccines. Lockdowns that led to suicides and depression, not to mention cancer deaths that would never have occurred if treated properly. Preventing doctors from treating Covid patients with drugs shown to be effective. De-registering doctors who speak out. And government agencies – the same governments that perpetrated the whole hideous Covid outcomes – get commentators like Mark Steyn sacked, commentators who are courageous enough to call out this industrial scale, officially sanctioned criminality. Go figure.
Paul Collits
4 March 2023
the time for abandoning Tobes draws nearer by the day. Do you follow James Delingpole on telegram? It gets brutal there... How long do you back someone who has done truly great things but has his head in the sand on this stuff for whatever reason? I did a piece (not on substack I don't think) about his default Hanlon's Razor position. He is a classic avoider of the conspiracy label, at all costs. Not sure what he is scared of.
Outstanding