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."
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
RIGHT-WING CARNY BARKERS: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter play conservative punditry for laughs, even when they swear they're not.
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.
"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.
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. That is precisely what Steyn himself did not do last February, when he attacked former Georgia senator Max Cleland, who has played a major role in Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Steyn mentioned Cleland in several different versions of his column, which he rewrites slightly for different papers. But in the Chicago Sun-Times version, he included a bonus paragraph about the grenade explosion that cost Cleland both legs and an arm:
"As Ann Coulter pointed out in a merciless but entirely accurate column, it wasn’t on the ‘battlefield.’ It wasn’t in combat. He was working on a radio relay station. He saw a grenade dropped by one of his colleagues and bent down to pick it up. It’s impossible for most of us to imagine what that must be like — to be flown home, with your body shattered, not because of some firefight, but because you made a stupid mistake. Once upon a time, Cleland loathed the Silver and Bronze Stars he’d been given: He was, in his words, ‘no hero’ — which is true. He was a beneficiary of the medal inflation that tends to accompany unpopular wars. But Cleland learned to stop hating himself to the point where he’s happy to be passed off as a hero wounded in battle because that makes him a more valuable mascot to the campaign. Sad."
Well, now. According to Cleland’s 1980 autobiography, Strong at the Broken Places, Steyn’s account, by way of Coulter, is accurate only if you ignore the context. Several days before his accident, Cleland had fought bravely in a battle that cost the lives of several of his fellow soldiers, and for which he won the Silver Star. Cleland did write that he didn’t deserve it — but, as he admitted in the introduction to the 2000 edition of his book, he was still bitter in 1980. Today he calls reporters’ attention to the official citation, which cites him "for gallantry in action" at Khe Sanh, a battle for which he volunteered. By the time the accident occurred, the fighting had indeed stopped. But to suggest that he was injured in a non-combat situation is obscene. The fact is that Cleland lost three of his limbs carrying out a necessary mission in a war zone.
"The right wing concludes who it wants to destroy first, then it finds a rationale in order to do it," Cleland told me in an interview. "With Coulter and this guy [Steyn], neither one of them contacted me, neither one attempted to verify any particular fact or series of facts." He called their columns part of "this massive Karl Rove right-wing slime machine" aimed at undermining Kerry’s presidential campaign.
The Steyn twist-o-matic was also at work in January 2003. The object on that occasion: Charles Pierce, who’d just written a profile of Ted Kennedy for the Boston Globe Magazine. In a passage dripping with sarcasm and irony, Pierce wrote this: "That’s how you survive what he’s survived. That’s how you move forward, one step after another, even though your name is Edward Moore Kennedy. You work, always, as though your name were Edward Moore. If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age." Now, I’ll grant that without the full context, it might not be immediately obvious that Pierce had just dropped a two-ton pile of fertilizer on Kennedy, but it was pretty damn clear to anyone who read the full article. I wrote at the time that the passage was "brutally vicious." Conservative James Taranto, who compiles "Best of the Web" for the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.com, called it a "paragraph of pure poison." A letter-writer to the Globe Magazine called it "truth, even though it is a savage attack that strikes too close for comfort."
Yet here is what Steyn wrote in the National Post: "Mr. Pierce’s point is a simple one: Sure, 34 years ago, Teddy fished himself out of the briny, staggered away and somehow neglected to inform the authorities until the following morning that he’d left some gal down there. But, if he was too tired to do anything for her back then, he’s been ‘tireless’ on her behalf ever since....
"But among the orthodox left the ... Pierce view is the standard line: You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks. This is subtly different from arguing that a man’s personal failings are outweighed by his public successes. Rather, they’re saying that a man’s personal flaws are trumped by his ideological purity, regardless of whether or not it works. I doubt whether a 62-year-old Mary Jo would regard Senator Kennedy as ‘bringing comfort’ to her old age."
A more willful misreading of Pierce you will not find. Unfortunately for Pierce, Steyn’s interpretation was echoed by Bernard Goldberg in his book Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite. From there, it was only a short journey to the right-wing, irony-challenged Media Research Center, which, in its annual "Dishonor Awards," gave Pierce its "Quote of the Year."
"My only contact with the guy was with him being enormously dishonest about something I’d written. And, I think, knowingly dishonest," says Pierce of Steyn. "If a guy who is that nakedly, intellectually dishonest can become a successful conservative writer, then conservative intellectualism is dead in this country. If it began with Buckley and the people who taught him, it ends with the likes of Mark Steyn."
THERE ARE MANY, many more examples I could cite. In a New Criterion piece, for instance, Steyn mentioned the title of a New Republic essay by Andrew Sullivan, "We Are All Sodomites Now," as being some sort of commentary on the state of gay sexuality. In fact, Sullivan’s was a closely argued piece in which he contended that all non-procreative sex, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is a form of sodomy. (For good measure, Steyn got the title wrong, too; it was "We’re All Sodomists Now.") On the cover of his most recent anthology, Mark Steyn from Head to Toe, as well as on his Web site, Steyn claims that Harper’s publisher Lewis Lapham once wrote of "[t]he poisonous language of a columnist by the name of Mark Steyn." In fact, the original reveals that Steyn cobbled together two of Lapham’s sentences; and that though Lapham is clearly not a Steyn fan, the "poisonous language" reference was not at all specific to Steyn. And on and on (and on) it goes.
Head to Toe itself is filled with right-wing rants of the most conventional kind. We learn, for example, that Al Gore’s makeup in the first 2000 debate and John Kerry’s hair say much about their shortcomings. The effect, in all too many instances, is of a second-rate Maureen Dowd — that is, of a writer who makes the same kind of pop-culture analogies as the New York Times columnist, only without the deft touch. The one piece from Steyn’s anthology that I unreservedly admired was his 1998 tribute to Frank Sinatra, published in the Sunday Telegraph, in which he recounted a moment when Sinatra, upon encountering the outstretched hand of an old adversary in a Las Vegas lobby, was said to have snarled, "Fuck you! Keep walking." Wrote Steyn: "Indeed, his entire oeuvre could be sub-titled ‘Fuck you! Keep walking.’" Good stuff. Unfortunately, that only reinforces the impression that Steyn is on firmer ground when writing about the arts than when he ventures into the political world.
Perhaps the most bizarrely skewed Steyn piece I’ve read was also his most ambitious: a long essay that appeared in the New Criterion this past January on the state of public education. Steyn started out by recounting the Saddam Hussein–worship that was the principal hallmark of Iraq’s schools before the fall of the regime, and whose evidence Steyn could still detect when he visited Iraq some months later. He then — I’m not making this up — compared this to the plague of political correctness that he detected in America’s public schools. He cited a few anecdotes, such as one involving an elementary school in Skokie, Illinois, where the traditional Thanksgiving program was canceled in favor of a talk by a member of the local Oglala Lakota tribe. But he reserved his deepest anger for the administrators of Pioneer High School, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who put together a "Homosexuality and Religion" panel for a Diversity Week program. Wrote Steyn: "When a Catholic student, Betsy Hansen, asked to be allowed to present the Church’s traditional teaching on the subject, she was told by the school that her views were ‘negative’ and would ‘water down’ the ‘positive’ message they wanted to convey — that even religious dudes think gay sex is way cool. As we know, ‘diversity’ means homogeneity — even if, as in this case, the homogeneity is utterly at odds with reality."
Leaving aside the not-unreasonable notion that organizers of Diversity Week may have believed the kids were getting quite enough of homosexuality-is-a-sin at home and in church, Steyn omitted crucial facts: Hansen’s family enlisted the aid of the right-wing Thomas More Law Center; a federal judge ruled against the school system; and Ann Arbor officials responded by canceling Diversity Week. Then again, sharing that information would have conflicted with another of Steyn’s favorite tropes: that liberals specialize in victimology, and that they love nothing better than to find a judge willing intercede on their behalf.
Steyn concluded: "How many of our teachers ... are ashamed at what they do, as some of those teachers I met in Iraq were? Or do they truly believe, like the Baathist apparatchiks, that they’re engaged in a great project that will enable their young charges to be model citizens of a remade society? I confess that, in America as in Iraq, I can’t tell which is which, and have come to the conclusion it doesn’t matter either way."
He can’t tell, and it doesn’t matter, whether American teachers understand that they’re no better than Saddam’s terrorized classroom sycophants. This isn’t analysis, or even argument. It’s nihilism.
STEYN OFTEN criticizes the mainstream American press for its stodgy lifelessness. Last year he told the Web site RightWingNews.com that "almost any other English-speaking country, from Australia to Pakistan, has a livelier press than the US big-city monodailies.... I think that’s why when conservative US bloggers need a bit of red meat they can tear to pieces they go to the Guardian rather than the Boston Globe or the San Francisco Chronicle. Idiocy-wise, there’s no difference, but the boys at the Guardian can write."
Judgments about idiocy aside, Steyn’s got a point. But if American papers are duller than they need to be, they at least try to get the facts straight. They often fail, but there are corrections and ombudsmen and letters to the editor to provide at least some accountability. Steyn, on the other hand, is an acerbic stylist who would enliven any op-ed page. Yet, in his hands, facts are malleable things, to be twisted and reinterpreted and omitted in order to advance his particular point of view. His malpractice is hardly unique; but his sins are more egregious, and his gifts are more obvious, than is the case with lesser but more scrupulous talents.
Mark Steyn has carved out a nice little spot for himself within the world of right-wing punditry. He earned it not on the strength of his arguments or the accuracy of his so-called facts, but, rather, on his cultured, forceful writing style. And, of course, by making the truth serve his purposes, rather than the other way around. Sure, he’s no worse than Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. But he’s no better, either.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at
dkennedy@phx.com. Read his daily "Media Log" at BostonPhoenix.com
