BAD ENOUGH BEING PLAYED FOR A SUCKER, BUT NOT EVEN REALIZING IT?:

Steyn’s way: Write, twist, smear, and sneer. Repeat! Meet Mark Steyn, the most toxic right-wing pundit you’ve never heard of. (DAN KENNEDY, 6/18/04, Boston Phoenix)

WITHIN THE TIGHT little world of conservative punditry, there are lines of demarcation that are rarely, if ever, crossed. Respectable commentators such as Paul Gigot, George Will, and David Brooks work for respectable outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. When they appear on television or radio, they carry that aura of respectability with them. Right-wing carny barkers such as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity, on the other hand, play it strictly for laughs, even when they swear they’re not. And even though the Gigots and Wills and Brookses of the world may often agree with the freak-show politics of talk radio and the Fox News Channel, they would never sully their reputations by actually taking part.

Then there is Mark Steyn, a pungent columnist, essayist, and critic who’s not well known in the United States, but whose political screeds are published in English-speaking countries around the world. A native of Canada who divides his time among New Hampshire, Quebec, and London, Steyn is a self-described right-wing warmonger. Like a respectable conservative, he has some high-tone affiliations. Steyn writes obituaries of the famous and not-so-famous for the Atlantic Monthly. He pens theater reviews for the New Criterion, a conservative arts-and-culture journal with a vaunted reputation. And he reviews movies for the Spectator, a venerable, classy London weekly magazine owned by the Hollinger media empire, his principal benefactor.

But if Steyn’s sharp, clear writing, quick mind, and wide-ranging curiosity appeal to the pretensions of the intelligentsia, there is another side to him as well. Steyn may possess more depth and range than Limbaugh or Coulter, but he shares much in common with them. To wit: a shrill, mocking tone of moral certainty that consigns those who disagree with him to the status of appeasers or even terrorists; and a willingness to distort, misrepresent, and omit facts in order to advance his argument. And if you think he couldn’t possibly be as bad as, say, Coulter, whose shtick is to pop up on television and denounce liberals as "traitors," consider this: in perhaps his sleaziest column of 2004, a condescending dismissal of triple-amputee war hero Max Cleland, Steyn’s principal source was Coulter.

"He’s kind of a glib guy, and he’s a better writer than most of them. And that gets you a long way on that side," says Joe Conason, a liberal columnist for the New York Observer and Salon. "I mean, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter can’t write. The thing he shares with the rest of them, obviously, is that he has no idea of limits or boundaries or decency." [...]

SO WHO IS Mark Steyn? According to his Web site, MarkSteyn.com, and other bits of biographical data I’ve been able to pick up, he is, despite his Canadian origins, the product of an English boys’-school education. His formal education ended with high school, and he worked as a disc jockey and BBC radio host before launching his writing career, about 15 years ago. He is ethnically Jewish, was baptized in the Catholic Church, was confirmed as an Anglican, and today attends an American Baptist church.

Steyn describes himself as "the one-man global content provider," and that is not inaccurate. His main source of income is the Hollinger chain, a worldwide media conglomerate run, until recently, by Conrad Black, now in trouble for allegedly lying about money, or lying about alleged money, or some such thing. Steyn’s political columns appear in a number of Hollinger properties, including the Chicago Sun-Times; the well-regarded, conservative Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph of London; and the Jerusalem Post, which is also conservative. He’s written for the Age, in Melbourne, Australia, in which Black at one time had an ownership interest. The non-Hollinger Irish Times carries his column as well. In the US, Steyn’s political pieces appear from time to time in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, National Review, the New York Sun, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Oddly enough, the English-speaking country where Steyn’s voice is least heard these days is Canada. The National Post, which Conrad Black founded in 1998 to compete with the dominant Toronto Globe & Mail, changed hands within the past few years, and Steyn’s column was dropped. The Post’s commentary editor, Jonathan Kay, is an unabashed Steyn admirer, calling him "brilliant" and comparing him to P.J. O’Rourke. Yet Kay also suggests that Steyn can be prickly to work with, recalling the time he changed "Mrs." to "Ms." in a Steyn reference to Abraham Lincoln’s wife so as to conform with the Post’s house style. "I don’t think he talked to me for a year after that," Kay says. "I took out a letter for political correctness, and that’s a grave sin in his book. I learned my lesson — I never changed a letter after that." Steyn’s only current regular Canadian outlet: the Western Standard, a new magazine that describes itself as "the independent voice of the New West."

Tucker Carlson, a commentator for CNN and, soon, PBS, who was recently attacked by Steyn as a "conservative cutie" who’s gone soft on the war, says of Steyn, "He’s kind of pompous. He’s obviously smart, he can be quite witty. I mean, I agree with a lot of what he writes. But the problem with being a columnist for too long is that a) you tend to repeat yourself and b) you tend to forget that you need to marshal facts to support your opinions."

Michael Miner, media critic for the Chicago Reader, says of Steyn: "I enjoy reading him. He writes very well. And he can be highly annoying. I’ve always sensed that he’s the quintessential Hollinger writer — very smart, very conservative, very sarcastic."

The nonpartisan media-watch Web site Spinsanity.org has whacked Steyn on several occasions — such as in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when Steyn strongly hinted that he wished a peace advocate could have been on one of the four planes that were hijacked, or, more recently, about a John Kerry appearance, of which Steyn wrote that "Kerry sounded awfully like America’s first French president." Spinsanity’s Brendan Nyhan told me by e-mail, "We’ve written several times about Steyn’s aggressive, inflammatory rhetoric and loose regard for logic and factual accuracy." [...]

STEYN WAS NOT interviewed for this piece. I sent him an e-mail requesting an interview on June 8. Two days later one of his assistants, Tiffany Cole, e-mailed back to me, "Mark isn’t sure what he’s done to merit the attention of the Boston Phoenix, but he wishes you all the best with the piece. He says he prefers not to speak to writers on these kinds of stories because ‘he always sounds like a jerk in interviews.’" Despite the rejection, I followed up later that day with detailed questions, including the matter of the Globe and the fake-rape pictures. This past Monday another assistant, Chantal Benoît, e-mailed to me that Steyn is traveling while doing research for a book, and had not seen my questions. "I do not think it would make any difference, so by all means move ahead," she wrote.

I mention this because I want to make it clear that Steyn’s staff knew I was preparing a harsh profile, and that I had given him ample opportunity to respond.

If you're going to attack your betters for their alleged inaccuracies it's probably a good idea to have your own ducks in a row. So, leave us set aside the notion that there is a "tight little world of conservative punditry" in a piece which then cites writers for the Times, the Post, Newsweek, etc.; Mr. Steyn's own rather wide range of publications he writes for; and his disagreements with several other conservative pundits--so much for tight and for little--instead let us start by asking if the Spectator even runs movie reviews, never mind whether Mr. Steyn writes them. Typically, as this week, he seems to have the lead essay. Presumably this would elevate him in Mr. Kennedy's eyes, as opposed to being a mere reviewer. If he does both weekly movie reviews and major essays for the same magazine it would be downright impressive, no?

Some of the assertions can probably be excused as hyperbole, even though they're just wrong. For example Paul Gigot has appeared on Fox with Brit Hume periodically and Charles Krauthammer, of the uptown Washington Post, is a regular. David Brooks was a regular essayist at--and one of the founding editors (?) of --Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, so it seems strange to draw a bright line as regards whether he'll appear on Mr. Murdoch's tv network.

Most amusing though is that an ink-stained drudge like Mr. Kennedy, at an alternative press no less, thinks that a fellow scribe has multiple personal assistants. When we contacted Mr. Steyn through his website to get a review copy of his terrific essay collection, Face of the Tiger, we were answered by an "assistant" who had a sense of humor and a tongue of marked similarity to the author. I'm willing to believe there's more than one Chantal Benoit, but find it hard to believe that Mr. Kennedy wasn't being toyed with via reference to this one. Suffice it to say, neither Ms Benoit nor Tiffany Cole are listed in our local phonebook. Mr. Steyn obviously guards his privacy, so he isn't either, but neither of his "assistants"?

Anyhow, it seems that what Mr. Kennedy has rendered here is a tendentious and error filled piece about an "aggressive" and purportedly error-plagued conservative whose worst sin would appear to be saying that John Kerry sounds French. In that regard we'd simply note the following story, Kerry tries to reclaim New Jersey (Charles Hurt, 6/16/04, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Asked whether Mr. Kerry's patrician — some say French — face and wife worth an estimated $550 million hurts his ability to relate to the working class, [William T. Mullen, president of New Jersey's building trades union] replied, "Yeah, but he's our rich French guy and we got to stick with him."

We eagerly await the Boston Phoenix hit piece on the indeceny of William Mullen, part of the tight little world of trade unionists...

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 19, 2004 9:32 AM