Марк Стейн: Биография и карьера канадского писателя и телеведущего.

Canadian writer (born 1959)

Mark Steyn (/s//t//aɪ//n/; born December 8, 1959) is a Canadian author and a radio and television presenter. He has written several books, including The New York Times bestsellers America Alone, After America, and Broadway Babies Say Goodnight. In the US he has guest hosted the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show, as well as Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, on which he regularly appeared as a guest and fill in host. In 2021, Steyn began hosting his own show on British news channel GB News. He left GB News in early February 2023, saying that the channel wanted him to pay fines issued by the UK media regulator Ofcom, which was investigating complaints of COVID 19 vaccination scepticism aired on The Mark Steyn Show. He has since moved his show to his own website.

Steyn was baptized a Catholic and was later confirmed in the Anglican Church, which he left to become a Baptist. He has stated that "the last Jewish female in my line was one of my paternal great grandmothers" and that "both my grandmothers were Catholic". His parents were married in Elliot Lake, Ontario. Steyn's great aunt was artist Stella Steyn. His mother's family was Belgian. Steyn was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, the same school that author J. R. R. Tolkien attended and where Steyn was assigned a Greek dictionary that had also been used by Tolkien. Although it was reported by The Age in 2006 that Steyn had left school at age 16, his name appears in the King Edward's School yearbook for 1977 78 as a member of "Cl. VI", that is, the "Classics [Upper] 6th form", which is the normal final year for students at that school.

Steyn worked as a disc jockey before becoming musical theatre critic at the newly established The Independent in 1986. As of 2010, Steyn was no longer the back page columnist for the print edition of National Review, conservative writer James Lileks having taken over that space. Steyn's back page column for National Review, "Happy Warriors", resumed with the issue of March 21, 2011. Steyn has contributed to the blog Ricochet. com and recorded numerous podcasts with the organization. Steyn frequently guest hosted The Rush Limbaugh Show. From December 2016 to February 2017, Steyn hosted The Mark Steyn Show on the CRTV Digital Network. CRTV abruptly cancelled the show after two months and went to arbitration, with both sides claiming breach of contract. Steyn also sued to keep the show on the air during arbitration, saying it was on behalf of his employees. Former show supervisor Mike Young called this "bullshit" when quoted in The Daily Beast. Former employees provided sworn declarations that Steyn was "incredibly disorganised", tyrannical, and impossible to work with. In October 2021, Steyn began covering for Nigel Farage on his prime time show Farage on GB News on Fridays and was a relief presenter for Farage on other days. On November 19, 2021, Steyn received a permanent prime time host billing on GB News, with the Friday show renamed Mark Steyn. In January 2022, the show began airing five nights a week, Monday to Friday, which in February was reduced to Monday to Thursday. In March 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Steyn presented the show from Western Ukraine. In December 2022, Steyn suffered a heart attack while broadcasting the Mark Steyn Show on GB News TV. He did not recognise the symptoms as a heart attack, but later suffered a second, while in France, where he was hospitalised. Steyn quit GB News in February 2023, in protest at the channel wanting to change his contract to make him personally liable for any fines issued by the UK's media regulator Ofcom, which was then investigating 411 complaints from viewers about Covid vaccine scepticism aired on Steyn's show, in potential breach of the Broadcasting Code. Steyn also complained changes in his contract would force him and his staff to attend regulatory compliance training sessions, which he referred to as "re education classes".

In a May 2004 column Steyn commented that editors were encouraging anti Bush sentiments after the Daily Mirror and The Boston Globe had published faked pictures, which originated on American and Hungarian pornographic Web sites, of British and American soldiers supposedly sexually abusing Iraqis. Steyn argued that the media only wanted to show images to Westerners "that will shame and demoralize them." In a July 2005 column for National Review, Steyn criticized Andrew Jaspan, then the editor of The Age, an Australian newspaper. Jaspan was offended by Douglas Wood, an Australian kidnapped and held hostage in Iraq, who after his rescue referred to his captors as "arseholes." Jaspan claimed that "the issue is really 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." Steyn argued that there is nothing at all wrong with insensitivity toward murderous captors, and that it was Jaspan, not Wood, who suffered from Stockholm syndrome. He said further, "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?"

Steyn wrote articles and maintained a blog for Maclean's covering the 2007 business fraud trial of his friend and financial patron Conrad Black in Chicago, from the point of view of one who was adamantly convinced Black never committed any crime. Doing this, he later wrote, "cost me my gig at the [Chicago] Sun Times" and "took me away from more lucrative duties such as book promotion". Steyn expressed dismay at "the procedural advantages the prosecution enjoys—the inducements it's able to dangle in order to turn witnesses that, if offered by the defence, would be regarded as the suborning of perjury; or the confiscation of assets intended to prevent an accused person from being able to mount a defence; or the piling on of multiple charges which virtually guarantees that a jury will seek to demonstrate its balanced judgment by convicting on something. All that speaks very poorly for the federal justice system." After Black's conviction, Steyn published a long essay in Maclean's about the case, strongly criticizing Black's defense team.

Steyn was an early proponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2007 he reiterated his support while attacking Democrat John Murtha, stating that Murtha's plan for military action in Iraq was designed "to deny the president the possibility of victory while making sure Democrats don't have to share the blame for the defeat. [Murtha] doesn't support them in the mission, but he'd like them to continue failing at it for a couple more years". In 2013, Steyn blamed the United States' lack of success in Iraq on "geopolitical ADHD", writing "the unceasing drumbeat of 'quagmire' and 'exit strategy' communicated to the world an emptiness at the heart of American power An awareness that America lacks "credibility" and "will" is what caused crowds to attack U. S. embassies and the consulate in Benghazi." Steyn's column prompted The Atlantic to call him an "unapologetic hawk", observing how his column failed to take account of his own declarations of victory in Iraq in 2004 when Steyn wrote: "After 15 months of running Iraq, the Americans are out the Americans have bequeathed them a better Iraq than the one the British invented for them eight decades ago So I'm relaxed about Iraq: its future lies somewhere between good enough and great."

In one of his first books, The Story of Miss Saigon (1991) co written with Edward Behr, Steyn offered up his stance on the Miss Saigon controversy of 1990. Steyn accused the Asian American activists opposed to the musical Miss Saigon of a "new tribalism" that threatened to bring in "a new era of conformity and sanctimoniousness".

Steyn's work America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It is a New York Times bestselling nonfiction book published in 2006. It deals with the global war on terror and wider issues of demographics in Muslim and non Muslim populations. It was recommended by George W. Bush. The paperback edition, released in April 2008 with a new introduction, was labeled "Soon to Be Banned in Canada", alluding to a possible result that Steyn then anticipated from the Canadian Islamic Congress' human rights complaints against Maclean's magazine.

In an essay about America Alone, Christopher Hitchens wrote that "Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an immensely convincing case," then detailed many points at which he disagreed with Steyn. Hitchens believed Steyn erred by "considering European Muslim populations as one. Islam is as fissile as any other religion, and considerable friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European countries. Moreover, many Muslims actually have come to Europe for the advertised purposes; seeking asylum and to build a better life." Nevertheless, Hitchens expressed strong agreement with some of Steyn's points, calling the book "admirably tough minded." Within its pages, After America discusses the U. S. federal debt specifically and more generally the rise of bureaucratic state control as individual initiative declines. Although written in a polemical style about controversial issues,

On August 17, 2011, Steyn discussed the book and a variety of related issues while delivering the first lecture in The NHIOP Bookmark Series, a program of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. C SPAN recorded Steyn's comments.