Dan Kennedy wishes he was Mark Steyn. I wish he would get his facts straight. Cleland lost his limbs in an accident. The "war hero" bit was not true. Of course, the rest of this smear is also twisted.
a condescending dismissal of triple-amputee war hero Max Cleland,
Steyn’s way
Write, twist, smear, and sneer. Repeat! Meet Mark Steyn, the most toxic right-wing pundit you’ve never heard of.
BY DAN KENNEDY - BOSTON PHOENIX ( A throwaway in Boston)
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."
Consider a Steyn column that appeared on May 16 in the Chicago Sun-Times, a Hollinger paper that is the only American outlet for his regular political column. The Abu Ghraib prison-torture scandal was still fresh and shocking. Insurgents were battling with US troops. And a hapless 26-year-old American, Nicholas Berg, was beheaded by terrorists, who videotaped their gruesome crime. Steyn knew just how to rally the spirits of his fellow warmongers: by demonizing anyone who dared to criticize the war. He did that in two ways.
First, Steyn made a hideously unfair comparison, linking those who were demanding Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation to Berg’s executioners. Wrote Steyn: "We have the ersatz warriors, the ham actors of Washington — Senators Kennedy, Levin, Leahy, Harkin and others too fond of seeing their names in print to mention — ‘calling for Rumsfeld’s head’ at a time when America’s enemies have already got Nick Berg’s, and they’re swinging it around on camera for the snuff video they’ll be distributing as a recruiting tool."
Second, Steyn twisted the facts to make it appear that the liberal media are so unpatriotic that they readily believe lies about American soldiers. His example was the Boston Globe, which, as you may recall, had just published a photo taken at a City Hall news conference in which pictures purportedly of American troops raping Iraqi women were visible in the background (see "Media Log," BostonPhoenix.com, May 12–14). Never mind that the accompanying story expressed deep skepticism about the authenticity of those pictures; Steyn lumped the Globe in with the London Mirror, whose editor was forced out after it was revealed that his paper had actually faked photos of British troops abusing Iraqi prisoners.
[Correction: the Mirror itself did not fake the photos, but, rather, was the victim of a hoax. For a time, the paper continued to insist that the photos were genuine despite serious questions that had been raised about their authenticity.]
"In the last few days," he wrote, "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 the details in the London snaps and the provenance of the Boston ones, it should have been obvious to editors at both papers that 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." Ah, yes. Back to the unfortunate Nick Berg, the meaning of whose death has apparently been revealed only to Steyn.
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’s first love is the musical theater, something he writes about knowingly and with passion for the New Criterion. His 2000 book Broadway Babies Say Goodnight was described by Publishers Weekly as a "delightful, irreverent romp through seven decades of American musical theater from Show Boat to Miss Saigon." Steyn’s immersion in musicals may also explain why he — a macho right-winger who’s married with children — feels compelled to drop into his writing snarky little quips about gays. For instance, there’s this, from a December 2003 New Criterion piece in which he recounted the career of Frank Baum, creator of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: "Baum invented Oz while holding down his day job as editor of Chicago Show Window, a magazine for department-store window decorators — and no, he wasn’t gay: the original friend of Dorothy was not a Friend of Dorothy."
And neither, he wants to be damn sure you know, is Mark Steyn.
Perhaps the most important question about Steyn is whether his straddling act — his role as a conservative pundit whose intellectual chops have given him the respectability of the Gigot/Will/Brooks camp, but who trucks in slime of the Limbaugh/Coulter/Hannity variety — has given him a greater reputation than he deserves. The thing is, the guy really has got talent. His Atlantic obituaries, whose subjects range from Madame Chiang Kai-shek to Jack Paar, are witting, knowing, and altogether satisfying. "We approached him because he is a trenchant and funny cultural critic," Atlantic managing editor Cullen Murphy told me by e-mail. "His writing for us, fact-checked like the rest of the magazine, has always been highly accurate."
Yet the very respectability conveyed by an affiliation with publications such as the Atlantic, the New Criterion, or the Spectator has given Steyn a cachet for political punditry that he hasn’t earned. Conservative Web sites gush over him. Conservative and libertarian bloggers such as Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds link to him regularly, giving him an American readership that may be far larger than his meager number of US outlets would suggest. Steyn may not be well known to American readers, but what little they do know of him is likely to be favorable. It shouldn’t be.
REST AT
bostonphoenix.com |
