Mark Steyn employed his journalistic brain on Covid stats from the UK Health Security Agency live on GB News on 21st April 2022. He stated their figures, issued two weeks prior to the broadcast, showed that “There’s 32 million who had the third booster shot, there’s 31 million who didn’t. So, we can directly compare the numbers, overall numbers, because they’re the same size. So, if you got the booster shot, you’re dying at three times the rate of the people who didn’t get the booster shot.”
Being Mark Steyn, this wasn't the only time in the show he asserted this as fact. There were four complaints, and the first we knew of an Ofcom inquiry was mid-July 2022.
Yesterday, some eight months later, Ofcom ruled that GB News and Mr Steyn had materially misled their audience, in breach of the Ofcom code. It takes more-judgely-than-real-judges Ofcom twenty pages to deliver there verdict - there is no sentence.
Entertainingly, some of the 20 pages are needed because GB News, occasionally advised by Nick Pollard, former chair of the Ofcom Content Board, defended the programme. Some of their grounds:
"Different interpretations of official data are possible, in fact, they are inevitable"
Mr Steyn's interpretation of the data was a “personal and considered one and was legitimate"
"One broadcast on a minority channel….carried little or no practical risk to the audience"
If the programme “was guilty of anything, it was nothing more than a rather forceful tone”
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