Former GB News presenter Mark Steyn has been ordered to pay £50,000 in legal costs after losing a High Court battle with Ofcom ahead of the full amount owed being decided.
Mr Steyn took legal action against the regulator over its decisions in 2023 that two of his shows in 2022 amounted to breaches of its rules, claiming they “killed” his career.
In a ruling in July, Mrs Justice Farbey dismissed the case, stating that Ofcom was “entitled to conclude” that the shows breached its rules and that its reasons for its decisions were “detailed and comprehensive”.
On Tuesday, the same judge ordered that Mr Steyn pay £50,000 to Ofcom by November 19, with remaining costs subject to a “detailed assessment” at a later date.
But she said it was “unsatisfactory” that the two sides had failed to reach an agreement on costs, and that “doubtless had wiser heads prevailed” the matter would have been agreed.
A hearing in June was told that the regulator’s decisions related to two broadcasts of Mr Steyn’s primetime show on GB News, which began with a monologue called The Steyn Line.
In an episode on April 21 2022, Mr Steyn gave a monologue on the rollout of Covid vaccines, based on UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) data.
Ofcom ruled on March 6 2023 that the show breached its rules as it gave a “materially misleading interpretation” of the figures, which risked “harm to viewers”.
A second show on October 4 2022 featured an interview with author Naomi Wolf, which the watchdog said included her likening the vaccine rollout to a “mass murder” which was comparable to the actions of “doctors in pre-Nazi Germany”.
The regulator ruled on May 9 last year that GB News failed to take “adequate steps to protect viewers” from “potentially harmful content”, labelling Dr Wolf’s comments as promoting “a serious conspiracy theory”.
Mr Steyn, who no longer works for the broadcaster and now lives in the United States, had asked the judge to quash both decisions, with his lawyers claiming that they had “killed his career” and had an “obvious chilling effect”.
Barristers for Ofcom said there was no “realistic basis” to claim it had “obviously gone wrong” in its reasoning, with the judge finding that it was “not ‘obviously wrong’”.
