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Mark Steyn Back in Court
— Mark Steyn (@MarkSteynOnline) June 20, 2024
Above is a short video statement from Mark in England.
I haven’t followed the case closely, but if memory serves Mark was fined by Ofcom in the UK for covering the cases of a few vaccine-injured. Mark promptly sued OfCom, and ultimately was fired by GB News. Details here.
Mark suffered another heart attack a few weeks ago and is in England against doctor’s orders.
I assume with Mark we’ll be able to dispense with the tedious discussion of whether or not he’s a “real” journalist. (To my eye, the “real” journalists are easy to spot – they’re the ones being prosecuted and persecuted)
Published in Journalism
Change “x” to “twitter” usually works. Let’s see:
What is going on with Mark’s health? I know he’s had a series of heart attacks, but are they doing anything for him? A pacemaker? A defibrillator? Do we know why his heart has suddenly become so unstable?
I have no idea of the details of his treatment. But he spoke highly of the doctors who treated him in France, and then again in Italy. Recently he’s been here in the states.
I know he had a heart attack in England, another in Paris, and another recently here in the states. To be honest, I think I’m forgetting one.
He sounded very weak and depressed in his most recent Q & A.
Mark Steyn says (14 Jun 2024):
If there was ever a personality to be preserved via AI, it should be Mark Steyn.
Ofcom and the CRTC should make one ever so grateful for the First Amendment. There’s almost nothing else like it in the Western world.
You can complain all you want about the biases in American media, but be grateful that the Constitution guards their right to spout their beliefs as it guarantees your right to do the same.
Except for that doctor in California who disclosed the fact that the medical institution where he was associated was lying about their approach to transgender medical issues and federal agents showed up to inform him he was indicted for several felonies.
Is what I just related true?
“Ofcom” is the UK “fairness” adjudicator for British broadcasting. Broadcasters are not required to sign onto its rules, but most, including GBNews, do. At the moment, it doesn’t cover web-based content, but there’s a movement supporting its implementation there, also.
It’s quite absurd, to think that adjudicating actual “fairness” has anything to do with Ofcom’s role, as anyone who’s ever watched the BBC, Sky, or any of the Ofcom regulated channels can plainly see.
I believe there were four complaints to Ofcom about Steyn’s show with Naomi Wolf (who’s not a plaintiff in the Steyn suit but is some sort of interested party). So it doesn’t take much to get Ofcom in gear, and it’s ideally set up for the heckler’s veto.
The judgment was actually against GBNews, not Steyn personally. Steyn subsequently said that TPTB at GBNews were trying to get him to sign a new contract in which he agreed to be personally liable for any fines resulting from Ofcom action (they dispute this). He says he refused to go along, and resigned. No doubt in my mind they’d have fired him anyway.
He’s had four major heart events (I think). The first one was in the UK, in the midst of the initial GBNews/Ofcom debacle. That was silent, and he didn’t know it. The second was soon after, on his trip to either France or Belgium. That was a very serious one and he ended up in a French hospital which he credits with saving his life. There was another incident a year or so ago when he is was in NH. He was sharply critical of the University of Vermont Medical Center (I think that’s the place where he said that the doctors said he needed a transfusion, and then–somehow, somewhere–the request was “denied,” and he was taken to Canada for treatment). Then there’s this most recent one.
I think Mark Steyn might argue this point.
There’s really no country that comes off brilliantly in the Steyn saga. Did the “free speech” rights in the US actually work as you suggest they should, he might not have spent the last thirteen years tied up in ruinous litigation with the litigious Michael Mann, nor have been found “guilty” by a DC court, nor have been fined $1m (on top of the five or six million he says it’s cost him in legal fees) and be facing the prospect of a lengthy appeals process to clear the decks.
At least in Canada he did win his “free speech” case against the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
Mark Steyn is an international treasure. Clearly the last two years have taken even more of a toll on him–healthwise–than the previous eleven. I should think he’s quite an obstreperous and difficult (and entertaining) so-and-so to be around, but I’ve had such folks in my life all my life, and I celebrate them.
We need them.
It is very difficult to see and understand why or how @ejhill thinks our guaranteed First Amendment free expression rights are being honored by those who have taken oaths to do so. Prime example, Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.
Texas.
Yes. Dr. Eithan Haim, a surgeon who completed his residency at the Texas Children’s Hospital, was accused of HIPAA violations and has been indicted on four felony charges. Haim has vowed to fight the charges and suggested the DOJ is corrupt.
Sorry about that, California.
Almost none of it. First, none of the felonies has a free speech element to it. They are alleged HIPAA violations and theft of information. If this were a First Amendment case it would involve the individual that published the information (Chris Rufo) and it does not. (And the case is in Texas, not California.) Second, the cases the doctor leaked information on all took place prior to the state banning such procedures.
The Mann litigation is civil, not criminal. The First Amendment protects Americans from the actions of their government, not each other.
Thanks for this. I didn’t realize that the Doctor had identified the individual patients in his disclosures.
I thought the Doctor said the institution was lying about what they were doing or not doing which might not have anything to do with what the state was requiting.
The doctor claims he stripped all identifying information from the stuff he gave Rufo. We’ll see.
Are indictments public? That disclosure would be the evidence for the indictment, I assume.
One can only hope that it will be one of the branches of government which will eventually rectify the situation, hopefully before Steyn passes on. Too bad it’s already passed up one opportunity to do so.
I believe there were four complaints to Ofcom about Steyn’s show with Naomi Wolf (who’s not a plaintiff in the Steyn suit but is some sort of interested party). So it doesn’t take much to get Ofcom in gear, and it’s ideally set up for the heckler’s veto.
She – I think Wolfe is more than some sort of interested party, and she is there in her own defense as well as Mark Steyn’s – here is her defense:
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/dr-naomi-wolf-responds-to-uk-media
I think she shows a lot of courage – they opened a can of worms….
She’s not a “plaintiff” in the case against Ofcom (just about the only way she could put herself on an equal footing with Steyn.)
She made a statement at the trial, and she stands with Steyn for the right to have an opinion, something I support. Although I think that–in many respects–she’s a loon who sometimes goes completely over the edge on matters that she’s not qualified to have an opinion on.
You may call it the reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. I see Wolf opining on something I don’t know much about. And then I remember what she had to say–and how she exposed herself as an idiot–on a matter on which I do have some expertise and a considerable knowledge myself.
And I think; “Well, honey, if you blew it so badly there, why should I believe you now?
Lucky for her I’m pretty determined to ferret out the truth of each matter, and to give credit where it’s due. Something others are, not so much.
Of course he’s not a real journalist, he started out as a DJ for God’s sake!
</something…>
Unless the Ds decide that you have no right to be on Twitter or YouTube. If not for Elon Musk, Jay Bhattacharya and many others would still be exiled from social media.
Start you own site didn’t apply when they went after Parler.
Parler is back, by the way.
Their mistake was relying on Amazon for their internet services.
Yes but if they hadn’t been shut down, they might have become a conservative competitor to Twitter. There are other alternatives now.
And GoDaddy, who revoked their Domain registration and Signing Certificate, and Google and Apple, who pulled their app from their App stores. Lets not forget these details.
I suppose, but phone apps have never been an issue for me. I use computers, not phones.
You can’t use a computer when there’s no Domain to connect to, and you can’t sign in when there no Certificate for TLS encryption (well, you can if you don’t mind sending everything in plaintext, I guess). They had to find a new Registrar willing to go against Amazon, Google, and GoDaddy’s wishes (Epik) and get new certificates issued by another Trusted Certificate Authority before they could even be reachable on their own hardware servers again.
Texas, not California.
His having stripped identifying information off the charts is not relevant. Under the HIPPA rules, it is generally illegal to look at the medical records of someone in whose care you are not involved. What people are overlooking in his case is that the Feds can prosecute him legitimately just for accessing the charts of these patients, as he was not caring for them. They have him dead to rights. We should all contribute to his crowd funding page, because he is going to need a lot of help.
Still a miscarriage. It was the First Amendment that prompted the Supreme Court to establish a pretty high bar for public figures to sue for defamation. Mann was undoubtedly a public figure and Steyn’s criticisms were clearly opinion. And yet the DC court let the claim survive a summary dismissal and let a DC jury punish someone who spoke against the climate narrative favored by their local citizenry (highly dependent on government dollars currently pumping the climate narrative).
Sounds like HIPPA needs to have a whistleblower provision, like many other statutes do.