GB News host Mark Steyn’s Covid vaccine claims broke Ofcom rules
GB News broke broadcasting rules last April when ex-presenter Mark Steyn made “potentially harmful and materially misleading” claims about Covid-19 vaccines, regulator Ofcom has said
He spoke about “only one conclusion” from official data, about the third jab’s “significantly greater risk” of “infection, hospitalisation and death”.
Ofcom said that was wrong and “may have resulted in viewers making important decisions about their own health”.
GB News said it was “disappointed”.
In his show, Steyn referred to data from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to compare people who had received the first two vaccinations with those who had also had a third as a booster.
“His interpretation that there was ‘only one conclusion’ from this comparison… was misleading because it did not take account of key factors such as the significant differences in age or health of the people in these two groups,” Ofcom said.
“The programme also failed to reflect that the UKHSA reports made clear that the raw data should not be used to draw conclusions about vaccine efficacy, due to the biases inherent in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.”
Ofcom said the group who had been boosted “included far larger numbers of older people”, and Steyn failed to take into account “the fact that older people are more likely to die or be hospitalised than younger people”.
‘No genuine challenge’
The regulator said it took into account the “definitive” way the Canadian broadcaster and author presented his conclusion, and the “absence of adequate counterweight or genuine challenge”.
Ofcom said broadcasters are “free to transmit programmes which may be considered controversial and challenging, or which question statistics or other evidence produced by governments or other official sources”.
“It can clearly be in the public interest to do so,” it added. “However, with this editorial freedom comes an obligation to ensure that, when portraying factual matters, audiences are not materially misled.”
In response, GB News said its role was “to ask tough questions, point out inconsistencies in government policy, and hold public bodies to account when the facts justify it”.
“Mark Steyn’s programme did exactly that,” its statement added. “We support his right to challenge the status quo by examining the small but evident risks of the third Covid booster.
“As news stories in the last week have highlighted, it was prescient to question whether the government was candid with all the facts. It is an important story in the public interest.”
Steyn “drew a reasonable conclusion from the facts”, but “drew only one conclusion”, GB News continued.
“We accept that the data offered several valid interpretations, and he should have made this clear. Had he done so, the story would have remained within the wide freedoms that Ofcom’s Broadcast Code allows.”
See more here bbc.co.uk
Header image: WND
Editor’s note: of course the BBC are going to defend the government narrative on the Covid ‘vaccines’. I wouldn’t expect anything else.
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Greg Spinolae
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OFCOM “rules”, in their own admission, appear to be:
• self-conflicting
• inconsistently applied
• aggressively invoked for SOME entities (eg. GB News)
• panderingly suggested to other entities (eg. BBC)
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VOWG
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The vax is killing people. End of story. Stop using it. Charge those responsible with crimes against humanity and when found guilty, hang them.
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just Me
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Hmmm…Should I trust Ofcom or Mark Steyn?
The approved propaganda is that it is a safe and effective vaxx, with multiple doses being even more safe and effective.
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Frank S.
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Given that Steyn has admitted to his own vax injuries, he’s hardly going to be a “cheerleader” for the government’s psy-op riddled narrative about its ‘thin the herd’ bioweapon. As long as truth is allowed to counter the twisted propaganda spun by the Globalists, both sides are well represented.
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