Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn (born 1959) is a Canadian journalist, columnist, and film and music critic. In recent years, he has written mostly about politics, from a conservative viewpoint. His 2006 book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, was a New York Times Bestseller.

Career

Steyn was born in Toronto, Canada and educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, England, but left education at 16 and returned to Canada to work as a disc jockey. His first break in journalism came when he was hired as the musical theatre critic for the then newly-established The Independent in London in 1986 (his first review was for The Phantom of the Opera). In 1992 he became film critic for The Spectator (then owned by the Hollinger group). After a number of years writing predominantly about the arts, his portfolio widened to embrace political comment and he moved to The Daily Telegraph, a conservative-leaning London broadsheet which was also owned by the Hollinger group at the time. Steyn became a close ally of former Canadian and Hollinger chief Conrad Black, and subsequently wrote for many of Black's newspapers.

He is unusual among political writers because of his lack of tertiary education and his sideways move from arts criticism into punditry. This move may have been precipitated by a conflict between Steyn and Hollinger over his status in the mid-90s: Steyn's movie reviews temporarily disappeared from their pages and when he returned, Steyn had been made a senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group, and North American editor for The Spectator.

Since then, he has written prolifically for a wide range of publications, many of them owned by Hollinger, including the Jerusalem Post in Israel, the Chicago Sun Times and the "Happy Warrior" column for National Review in the United States, The Australian, and formerly for the Irish Times in Ireland. He wrote for the Canadian newspaper National Post in the late 90s, but his position became uncertain after the purchase of the newspaper by Canwest Global; he ceased to write there in May 2003. In Canada, he now writes weekly for Maclean's and twice monthly for the Western Standard. He also writes theatre reviews for the New Criterion, obituaries for the Atlantic Monthly, and makes weekly appearances on The Hugh Hewitt Show, a conservative talk radio programme.

Partly through his relationship with the Hollinger Group (which owns publishing interests internationally), Steyn has been able to develop a readership in print media across the "Anglosphere" - he has, at one time or another, been regularly published (not just syndicated) in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand as well as in Israel. He has sometimes been mistakenly referred to as a 'blogger' - while Steyn's website (www.steynonline.com) collates links to his columns and occasionally publishes material written exclusively for the website, he does not maintain any kind of blog. He does occasionally post to National Review Online's group blog, The Corner, along with other conservative commentators who are not normally categorized as "bloggers".

In February 2006, Steyn ceased to write for the Spectator or the Daily Telegraph. In response to a letter on his website on 2nd March 2006, Steyn hinted at the reasons for his departure. "The Telegraph Group and I have been unable to reach agreement on a new contract, and what’s more they seem to be having great difficulty ponying up the final payment on my last contract. A sad end to a long and for the most part happy relationship." Neither publication is now a Hollinger property. Steyn ceased writing for The Atlantic in April 2007 following a disagreement with the editors. In a post on Mclean's website dated 19 July 2007, Steyn stated that he had also left the Sun-Times during the course of the trial of Conrad Black when the paper "yanked" a column of his defending Black. He also alleged that since the split, the Sun-Times had run several of his syndicated columns without his permission.

Steyn has written two books, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now in 1997 (a history of the musical theatre) and America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It in 2006, a New York Times bestseller. He has also published two collections of his columns, and a collection of his celebrity obituaries and profiles from The Atlantic. (See Bibliography below.)

Steyn now divides his time between Quebec in Canada, and Lyme, New Hampshire in the United States, due to NH being one of the States with the least amounts of government intrusion. He is married to a former editor he met whilst working at the Independent, and has three children.

Steyn and politics

He has long railed against the policies of the Liberal Party, which has dominated federal politics in Canada. These policies include multiculturalism, public healthcare, taxation, gun control, opposition to Quebec separatism and alleged anti-Americanism, all of which he describes as 'Trudeaupian', in a reference to former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

He was a proponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has continued to support that action. He is scornful of the United Nations, advocating either United States withdrawal from the organization or its complete disbandment. He frequently refers to the investigation into corruption at the United Nations, especially the Oil-for-Food Programme, as well as the allegations of sex slavery during Bosnian Peacekeeping operations and inaction during the Rwandan Genocide.

He frequently lampoons environmentalists and mocks people he regards as "global warming alarmists".

He wrote a column in May 2004 complaining about media bias and low journalistic standards, attributing this to a political agenda, and double standards in relation to the conflict in Iraq:

"In the last few days, The Mirror, a raucous Fleet Street tabloid, has published pictures of British troops urinating on Iraqi prisoners and the Boston Globe, a somnolent New England broadsheet, has published pictures of American troops sexually abusing Iraqi women. In both cases, the pictures turned out to be fake. From a cursory glance at details in the London snaps and the provenance of the Boston ones, it should have been obvious to editors at both papers they were almost certainly false. Yet they published them. Because they wanted them to be true. Because it would bring them a little closer to the head they really want to roll - George W. Bush's. If you want to see what the Islamists did to Nick Berg or Daniel Pearl or to those guys in Fallujah or even to the victims of September 11, you'll have to ferret it out on the Internet. The media aren't interested in showing you images that might rouse the American people to righteous anger, only images that will shame and demoralize them".

In a July, 2005 column for National Review, he again criticized the media. In this case it was Andrew Jaspan, editor of the Australian newspaper The Age, who was offended by Douglas Wood, an Australian who was kidnapped and held hostage in Iraq, and then referred to his captors as "arseholes" after he was rescued:

"The Age’s editor didn’t care for this brusque mean-spirited judgmentalism. As Mr. Jaspan told Australia’s ABC network, 'I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood’s use of the arsehole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought-through and I think demeans the man and is one of the reasons why people are slightly skeptical of his motives and everything else. The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive.'

And heaven forbid we’re insensitive about “insurgents.” True, a blindfolded Mr. Wood had to listen to his captors murder two of his colleagues a few inches away, but how crude and boorish would one have to be to hold that against one’s hosts? The liberation of Douglas Wood is surely a first: He didn’t get Stockholm Syndrome, but everyone back home did. What’s with this guy, anyway? They fed him every day and if they’d ever got around to sawing his head off they’d have got out the nice sharp scimitar, not the old rusty thing they used for Nick Berg. Like, why’s he so totally insensitive? Is he a Bush supporter or something?"

Steyn on the Western Civilization and Islam

Mark Steyn is also a commentator on divisions between the United States and Europe, as well as divisions between the Western world and the Islamic World. He frequently criticizes the tolerance of Islamic cultural intolerance in the name of multiculturalism, for example in an oft-quoted article on demography that became the basis for America Alone, where he wrote that

"The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures--the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society."

Later in the same piece he wrote

"Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In "The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

"Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."

"Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists.

Steyn has also written that:

"As I understand it, the benefits of multiculturalism are that the sterile white-bread cultures of Australia, Canada and Britain get some great ethnic restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony that lasts until two in the morning. But, in the case of those Muslim ghettoes in Sydney, in Oslo, in Paris, in Copenhagen and in Manchester, multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture -- the subjugation of women -- combine with the worst attributes of Western culture -- licence and self-gratification. Tattoed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of Northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort at Rideau Hall. Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes -- women's rights, gay rights -- the political class turns squeamishly away.

"As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I'm not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation."

Criticism

Critics argue [1] that Steyn disregards opposing arguments and events that contradict his earlier predictions. These include his repeated claims that Osama Bin Laden was "certainly" dead. His incorrect predictions have been widely mocked. For example, Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Guardian wrote,:

"Apart from predicting that George Bush would win the 2000 presidential election in a landslide, Steyn said at regular intervals that Osama bin Laden "will remain dead". Weeks after the invasion of Iraq he assured his readers that there would be "no widespread resentment at or resistance of the western military presence"; in December 2003 he wrote that "another six weeks of insurgency sounds about right, after which it will peter out"; and the following March he insisted that: "I don't think it's possible for anyone who looks at Iraq honestly to see it as anything other than a success story." [2]:

He has been accused of "Steynwalling"[3], meaning refusal to acknowledge errors.

Johann Hari accused Steyn of falsely claiming that "[o]n September 10, 2001, a sixth-grade student of Middle Eastern origin at a Jersey City school warned his teacher to stay away from Lower Manhattan".[4] Steyn was quoting reporter Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, who was fired after writing that story for reasons that have never been made public.[5]

Later, in a review of America Alone, Hari accused Steyn of "raw racism", pointing to a passage which he argues shows Steyn to be celebrating the birth of 'white' babies over those of other ethnicities. He also states that Steyn "describes as 'correct' a friend who talks about 'beturbanned prophet-monkeys'" and goes on to say that "for [Steyn], culture is merely a thinly veiled homologue for race."[6]

Steyn hosted The Rush Limbaugh Show on August 24 2006 [7]. He referred to Vietnamese communists as "gooks" when comparing the Vietnam and Iraq wars, saying,[8]

You know, basically, if you want to find an exit strategy for Iraq, then pretty soon, you're going be — have to be finding an exit strategy for a lot of other places because those jihadists, they're not like the gooks in Vietnam.

Later in the program he explained:

I was using that word with period quote marks around it... So, if anyone was offended, I apologize, and I will try to offend you in a more contemporary sense in the course of the next hour.

Steyn's critics have accused him of rationalizing the Bosnian genocide, based on a paragraph from America Alone which was quoted in a review[9] (emphasis added):

Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em.

In response to the accusations, Steyn stated:[10]

My book isn’t about what I want to happen but what I think will happen. Given Fascism, Communism and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, it’s not hard to foresee that the neo-nationalist resurgence already under way in parts of Europe will at some point take a violent form.

Steyn on Virginia Tech Killings

In an April 18, 2007 article in The National Review about the killings at Virginia Tech, Steyn argued that media coverage of the incident demonstrated an "awful corrosive passivity" which "is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society."[11]

In response to Geraldo Rivera's characterization of the student body at Virginia Tech as "children", Steyn said: "They’re not 'children.' The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men."

Populist cultural positions

Steyn's writings show an easy familiarity with past and current pop-cultural phenomena such as South Park. Steyn once presented a programme on BBC Radio 3, and has claimed to be the first person to play a Madonna record on that station. (BBC Radio 3 has historically been a high-culture-oriented station which mainly plays classical music).

Steyn has been a vocal critic of American journalism and the so-called j-school culture ostensibly entrenched in the journalism departments of many American universities, describing American newspapers as "the dullest in the world", and dismissing the idea of journalism as a profession to be studied. "When I started out in journalism, in Fleet Street, everybody I knew was only doing journalism because their lives had gone horribly wrong...and that's what happened to me. I needed some money in a hurry and thought I'd do journalism for a few weeks until something better came along, and it never did so now I'm stuck with it."

Steyn and the "incorrect correction"

A quote about Steyn has now made it into the realms of folklore legend because gaff spotters Jay Leno ("Headlines") and Richard Lederer (Anguished English calendar 24 July 2007) both noticed the unusual apology. There appeared (presumably in the Ottawa Citizen and Southham News) the following apology:

The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wish to apologize for our apology to Mark Steyn, published Oct. 22. In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Steyn published Oct. 15, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction. We accept and regret that our original regrets were unacceptable and we apologize to Mr. Steyn for any distress caused by our previous apology.

Steyn gave the following explanation about the apology:

"MS: I always love that. That actually ties into the Conrad Black thing. That comes from the good old days when he owned all the newspapers up in Canada. And I was a columnist for the National Post up there, and another columnist who I had a kind of feud with had, I argued, grossly libeled me in a column. So I called this kind of mid-level executive, and demanded an apology. And the guy thought I deserved an apology, but he gave me a rather sort of cheese paring one, and not on the terms we’d agreed. As you know, these things are usually agreed. So I flounced off in a big queeny huff, and simply ceased writing for all of Conrad Black’s newspapers.

HH: Oh my.

MS: And so then, this executive realized he was in big trouble, and they came groveling back to negotiate things. And I said there’s no money, there’s no…you haven’t got enough money to make me come back. And he said, so he goes, what would make you come back? And I then dictated this apology, more or less, off the top of my head. And he said to me, you’re joking. We’re going to look like a bunch of idiots. And I said you should have thought about that before you wrecked the first apology." (Hugh Hewitt Radio Transcript 5/11/2007)

Awards

Mark Steyn was awarded the 2006 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism [12]. The annual award recognizes the work of a columnist, editorialist or writer whose work defends and expresses admiration of the United States and its democratic institutions. Steyn's article "Be Glad the Flag Is Worth Burning" was nominated for the award. The following is an extract: "One of the big lessons of these last four years is that many, many beneficiaries of Western civilization loathe that civilization, and the media are generally inclined to blur the extent of that loathing"[13]. The prize included a check for $20,000.

Bibliography

• The Story of Miss Saigon (by Edward Behr and Steyn; 1991, ISBN 1-55970-124-2)
• Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now (1997, ISBN 0-415-92286-0)
• The Face of the Tiger (2002, ISBN 0-9731570-0-3; collected columns)
• Mark Steyn From Head To Toe: An Anatomical Anthology (2004, ISBN 0-9731570-2-X; collected columns)
• America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2006, ISBN 0-89526-078-6)
• Mark Steyn's Passing Parade (2006, ISBN 0-9731570-1-1; collected obituaries)

References

• Frum, Linda. "The Man Who Likes to Poke the World in the Eye". National Post, Saturday, October 14 2006. Volume 8, # 297, page A3. [14]

[15]

[16] Column where Steyn calls the police officer who arrested Senator Craig a "creep."

External links

• Steyn Online
• Quotable Barbs
• C-SPAN Interviews with Mark Steyn

• "Caught in the cross-fire", a column by Steyn in The Washington Times of 18 May 2004
• "The man who likes to poke the world in the eye", National Post, 2006-10-14
• Audio: Mark Steyn talks about his book, America Alone on "Shire Network News" (2 parts)