Tag Archives: Mark Steyn

News

Mark Steyn asks whether Fox News is more biased than CBC or BBC

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Story from Maclean’s magazine.

You all remember that I had written about how a Quebec news media billionaire was contemplating the launch of a center-right news network in Canada, modeled off of Fox News? Well, guess what? The government-run CBC and the government-run university leftist professors are not pleased.

Mark Steyn explains:

Meanwhile, back at the CBC, Don Newman explains it for us: “Fox News has been hugely polarizing. It specializes in drive-by attacks and misrepresentations, and is positively Orwellian at times, claiming to be ‘fair and balanced’ while implying that its competitors aren’t.
“The reality is that it mainly spews out propaganda that is dangerously misleading and often factually wrong.”

Again: example? Just one?

Now I’m not a responsible, objective, neutral journalist like Mr. Newman. But even we hyperventilating schoolyard bullies spewing to the converted and debasing all others know enough about passing ourselves off as journalists to be aware that you can’t just declare things to be so without producing some evidence thereof. And yet Messrs. Dornan and Newman spend, between them, 2,000 words doing just that. Surely with so many “drive-by attacks” and so much Orwellian bombast to choose from, it would be the work of moments to produce some devastating sound bite by this or that right-wing blowhard. Otherwise, it risks looking a bit like—how would one put it?—a “positively Orwellian” “drive-by attack” by someone “claiming to be fair and balanced” while insisting his competitors aren’t.

And what about the BBC?

A couple of weeks ago, the BBC’s so-called “Ethical Man” Justin Rowlatt presented an analysis of professor James Lovelock’s assertion that “climate change” is so serious a crisis that it “may be necessary to put democracy on hold.” As a BBC host, Mr. Rowlatt is scrupulous not to have any views of his own; he merely presents those of others—and, as he put it, “there is a growing view that mitigating climate change means we have to change our view of democracy.”

Really? That view is “growing”? Certainly in the BBC green room. Six of the seven experts interviewed by Justin Rowlatt were in favour of suspending democracy—i.e., fascism. But don’t worry: it’s to save the environment, so it’s eco-fascism, which has a nicer ring, doesn’t it? The show concluded with Mayer Hillman of the Policy Studies Institute insisting that “the condition of the planet for future generations is more important than the retention of democratic principles.” The BBC, paid for by the citizenry, has just broadcast a lavishly produced advertorial for totalitarianism.

It’s worth a read. Fox News dominates the cable news ratings race – no other network comes close.

Commentary

Mark Steyn writes the meanest thing ever written about Obama

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From National Review. (H/T Caffeinated Thoughts)

Excerpt:

In that interview about how he hadn’t given enough interviews, he also explained to George Stephanopoulos what that wacky Massachusetts election was all about:“The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts.

And:

The defining moment of his doomed attempt to prop up Martha Coakley was his peculiar obsession with Scott Brown’s five-year-old pickup:

“Forget the ads. Everybody can run slick ads,” the president told an audience of out-of-state students at a private school. “Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck.”

How they laughed! But what was striking was the thinking behind Obama’s line: that anyone can buy a truck for a slick ad, that Brown’s pickup was a prop…

[…]Howard Fineman, the increasingly loopy editor of the increasingly doomed Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn’t just any old prop but a very particular kind: “In some places, there are codes, there are images,” he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. “You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.”

Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer. Man, he’s racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that’s easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts.

I only link to this because now everything I write will seem nice by comparison.

News

Mark Steyn discusses pastor Stephen Boissoin’s victory against the HRCs

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Story on the Corner. (H/T ECM, Blazing Cat Fur)

Excerpt:

A couple of years back, the Reverend Stephen Boissoin committed the crime of writing a letter to a local newspaper objecting to various aspects of “the homosexual agenda”. The Alberta “Human Rights” Tribunal convicted him of this crime and imposed a lifetime speech ban preventing him, in essence, from saying anything about homosexuality in public or private ever again anywhere for the rest of his life.

Here’s an except from the judge’s decision:

The direction to cease and desist the publishing of “disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals’ is beyond the power of the Panel. “Disparaging remarks”were not defined by the Panel. But clearly, “disparaging remarks” are remarks much less serious than hateful and contemptuous remarks and are quite lawful to make. They are beyond the power of the Act to regulate and the power of the Province to restrain.

More details here:

The thing is – Boissoin did not get off Scot-free. He had a gruelling 6-year trial and paid well over six figures in legal fees. It’s not clear to me what his remedy is to recover these years of his life and these funds. His accuser’s legal costs were covered by the province of Alberta.

I just don’t believe that things will turn out any different down here, given the kind of people that Obama surrounds himself with. Obama has signed a hate crime bill into law which paves the way for criminalizing speech critical of the minorities listed in the bill. And whenever the right to free speech conflicts with the leftist right “not to be offended”, the “right not to be offended” always wins. This is the way that the secular left is – they want to silence anyone who disagrees with them.

I don’t mind when people say things that offend me, and I sure hope that nothing I say offends anyone else. But in any case, I would rather be asked to apologize than be put on trial for 6 years and forced to pay over a $100,000 in legal fees just because I disagreed with someone and they felt badly. We need to get to the point where radicals on the left understand that it is OK for people to disagree with them, and that it is not OK to bring the force of the government down on people because of speech.

Next time, vote Republican.

Related stories

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