After a very agreeable week at sea with Michele, Conrad, Leilani, Samantha et al on The Mark Steyn Caribbean Cruise, I am now on terra firma - for the second half of the brief interlude between my twelve-year ordeal in the District of Columbia Superior Court and the rather zippier process in the High Court of England. The King (upon the Application of Mark Steyn) vs Ofcom comes to the Royal Courts of Justice on June 11th. See you there!
~Re DC justice, the Supreme Court of the United States has graciously permitted the leader of the opposition to remain on election ballots - and less than twenty-four hours before the Colorado primary! Presumably, the Deep Staters will now move on to some as yet unspecified Peter Strzok-like "insurance policy".
~Also re DC justice, Julie Kelly notes the 100 per cent J6 conviction rate by DC juries:
After 2 years and more than 100 jury trials, not a single J6 defendant has walked out of a DC courtroom fully exonerated by DC jurors. Not one.
Compare this to DOJ's track record in Whitmer fednapping hoax: half the defendants put on trial were acquitted by Michigan juries... https://t.co/SDmwhBS1Lf
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) March 4, 2024
Even Mubarak or Saddam would occasionally let some guy walk just to make their "justice" system look less risible. We shall have more on DC juries later in the week. But, as Conrad Black and I discussed last week, no country should extradite anyone into the care of US "justice".
~Re English justice, Ofcom is the state media censor in the United Kingdom, and they have twice ruled against me for The Mark Steyn Show's coverage of the Covid vaccines and the death and injuries left in their wake. As you know, every day some under-reported story somewhere on the planet confirms the truth of what I said two years ago - but alas, there is no greater sin in media than being right too soon. And, during the lockdown years, Ofcom made it plain that it exists to protect the official narrative and that no TV or radio station in the United Kingdom shall be permitted to deviate too far therefrom.
I am the first presenter to sue Ofcom in a decade-and-a-half. I used to say, during my long-ago Canadian travails, that Margaret Atwood and David Suzuki would have made far more appealing victims. In the UK, one might have plumped for, oh, David Attenborough. But, to modify Rumsfeld, you go to court with the client that you have. GB News will not be alongside me in the King's Bench Division. They threw me over in order to stay on the right side of the state censor. So how's that working out for them?
We've found an episode of Dan Wootton Tonight on GB News in breach of our broadcasting rules.
Our investigation took careful account of broadcasters' & audiences' right to freedom of expression, and a range of contextual factors.
🔗 Our full statement: https://t.co/N8AKJ9ufkO pic.twitter.com/uKFQZoHi5S
— Ofcom (@Ofcom) March 4, 2024
This was, if memory serves, the twelfth Ofcom investigation into GB News, and concerns Laurence Fox's opinion that one would not wish to shag a journalist called Ava Evans. I thought that Megyn Kelly had the best take on the matter, and added my tuppence-three-farthing here. But as I wrote back then:
Remember what the Steyn Show used to do on GB News? Vaccine victims ignored by the government and vaporised on social media. The industrial-scale gang-rape of English schoolgirls up and down the land from Rochdale to Banbury. The utter uselessness of the British constabulary, who are too busy dancing their clubfooted macarenas to investigate any crimes.
Seen any of that lately on GBN? As I've said with each of these new Ofcom complaints, GB News would have done better to push back against the Steyn rulings - because at least then you'd be taking a stand on the biggest public-policy disaster of our times, as opposed to defending the right to pronounce a woman entirely non-shaggable. Which, in terms of free-speech first principles, may indeed be a right, but not one you'd necessarily want to argue before a jury, never mind faceless ideological commissars of a highly politicised state bureaucracy.
The descent into a Tories'n'trivia channel was a conscious strategy to insulate GB News from its enemies. Doesn't seem to be working out.
Three GB hosts were yanked from the airwaves immediately - Laurence Fox, Calvin Robinson and Dan Wootton - and suddenly my own defenestration seemed not (as management assured my former comrades) strictly a one-off but in hindsight a portent of things to come. Laurence, like me, will never work in "mainstream" (Ofcom-regulated) broadcasting again; Dan's position is a little more ambiguous; and Calvin falls somewhere in between. And yet, despite the sacrifice of a trio of audience favourites, the deal GBN thought they had with Ofcom - tossing me overboard and retreating to Tories'n'trivia - appears to be off.
This nugget in the full ruling caught my eye:
Ofcom considered that in the circumstances of this case, Dan Wootton was a third party who may be directly affected and, under our Procedures, it was appropriate to give him an opportunity to make representations on Ofcom's Preliminary View.
That's in striking contrast to their rulings against me - in neither of which was I given "an opportunity to make representations". That's one of the reasons I took 'em to the High Court: the dozy London papers treat Ofcom decisions as having the force of criminal convictions (when I die, its judgments will undoubtedly be in the first paragraph of any UK obits) and yet the accused is denied an opportunity to testify on his own behalf. So something seems to have changed at Ofcom, just ahead of their court date in June.
Again as in my case, there also appears to be a significant difference between GBN's account of what happened and Dan Wootton's:
Mr Wootton said he "did not receive advice in his earpiece by the production team" as GB News have "inaccurately represented to Ofcom". Mr Wootton explained that he was only told once to provide "some sense of balance" by a member of the production team...
Mr Wootton said it was not true that GB News had told Mr Wootton to make an on-air apology "during the advertising break immediately after the conclusion of the discussion" with Mr Fox, that the programme's executive producer told Mr Wootton to make an on-air apology and that he was sent a text instruction to apologise from a senior member of editorial management. Mr Wootton added that "no instructions or comments of any kind were made to our client... until almost an hour after Mr Fox made his remarks on air". This, Mr Wootton said, meant GB News' executive producer and editorial management had considered his immediate response to Mr Fox to be sufficient or that his "actions had certainly not been insufficient up to that point".
Mr Wootton said that Ofcom had mistakenly stated in the Preliminary View that he had been instructed to apologise immediately after Mr Fox's comments and had been provided with an apology to read out. Mr Wootton said that the instruction to apologise was given to him during the final advertising break in the programme, an hour after the incident, and he never saw the wording of the apology on the autocue.
Calling Dan's backroom guys a "production team" is a bit of a stretch. As my own associates discovered during a trip to London that included sitting in on his show, the slipshod crew in the GBN gallery despises Mr Wootton, and, amidst the general hooting and jeering, is not averse to outright sabotage. This is part of the general toxic culture that management believes serves its purposes. On my own show, we controlled the autocue (teleprompter, in American) at our end - and, when in London, always hired our own prompter operator, a delightful lady called Leila, in part because of the contempt for Dan my North American colleagues had witnessed in the GB studios.
So, when it comes to the fundamental differences between management's account and Mr Wootton's solicitors, I incline to Dan. My first reaction to Ofcom's finding that GBN exercised "ineffective management of the gallery" was to fall to the floor in paroxysms of laughter for an hour and a half. Nevertheless:
Breach of Rule 2.3
In light of the circumstances of this case, Ofcom has significant concerns about GB News' editorial control of its live output. We are requiring GB News to provide further detailed information about its compliance practices in this area for Ofcom's consideration, and requesting it attends a meeting at our offices to discuss this.
Exiled from the airwaves, Laurence Fox calls this "one of the biggest pieces of confected outrage I've ever witnessed":
I'm not overly bothered about this anymore. I could have expressed myself better, that's life and I've said my bit. I still think it's one of the biggest pieces of confected outrage I've ever witnessed, but in the interests of openness and transparency.
Everything I said on air... https://t.co/Fq7HGRwjcj
— Laurence Fox (@LozzaFox) March 4, 2024
This bit from Lozza is well-taken:
The funniest bit was listening to the head honcho's grovelling condemnation of misogyny on the airwaves the next day. The same chivalrous hero who reportedly had a female colleague paid off with a five figure sum to keep schtum about some pretty spicy allegations against him coming to light.
That's a reference to GB CEO Angelos Frangopoulos - or the "thwarted shagger" as I put it last year. Aside from the specific settlement made to the female presenter referenced above, GB News has a corporate culture of virulent misogyny: It's an old boys' club, which one takes as one finds it, except that in this case the old boys aren't any good at their job. The only female exec on the editorial side was also the only person in senior management who knew anything about television: Helen Warner. She lasted less than four months - because at GB News strong successful women are expected to know their place, which is at another company.
As I said way back when, the shaggability of Ava Evans is not a hill to die on; Covid and the vaccines and the right to push back against the suffocating propaganda most certainly is. But, thanks to the totally unconservative "Conservative Party" that governs that benighted land, Ofcom'ss censorship powers have now been extended to the Internet. At top right is Chief Censor Dame Melanie Dawes with some of the ladies she has just hired to police the latest additions to her dominions. The impact of Rishi Rich's grisly decision will ripple far beyond Commissar Dawes's nominal jurisdiction: for many tech platforms and web publishers, it will not be worth the effort to adjust one's content for different parts of the world; it will be easier to self-censor the lot.
And so the shrivelling of free speech in a land that was once the crucible of liberty accelerates day by day. You know my old line: Britain is the land where everything is policed except crime. So, as my friend Leilani Dowding points out, you can be gaoled for two years for putting stickers on lampposts - whereas raping twelve-year-old girls just gets you a bit of undemanding "community service":
Meanwhile This is Hamoud Al Soaimi, 21, a Kuwaiti who was part of a rape gang made up of foreigners in Newcastle.
He was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault and one assault by penetration of a 12 year old girl.
His punishment?
180 hours of community service and no... pic.twitter.com/vwHmtk97XD
— leilani dowding 🌸🚜 ☮️ (@LeilaniDowding) March 3, 2024
If you have no desire to "shag" someone, your career is over. If you'll "shag" anything down to primary-school level, four months of community service and you'll be back cruising the Tyneside child gang-rape scene.
We used to talk about that sort of thing on GB News. Not anymore.
~As noted above, Mark's first and second Statements of Claim against the UK media censor Ofcom have been accepted for judicial review by the High Court of England. The King's Bench Division will hear the case in June - and we certainly hope it goes better than it did for the Duke of Sussex in the same venue. Many readers have inquired about how to support Steyn's latest Free-Speech Lawsuit of the Month, this time over Ofcom's throttling of honest discussion of the Covid and the vaccines. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate;
c) ordering a copy of Mark's latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell); or
d) lavishing upon your beloved a once-in-a-lifetime Mark Steyn Cruise. We're planning the next one right now!
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in latter pair, a significant chunk thereof. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.
~Notwithstanding the last-night partying on The Mark Steyn Cruise, we had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer interviewing Mark on the media and related matters. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date opted for Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps. If you prefer John Buchan's original novel, you can hear Mark read that here. On Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week offered a song to close out the St David's Day weekend.
If you were too busy spending the weekend agog at Nikki Haley's stunning performance in the District of Columbia Republican primary, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
