GB News and Project Veritas are very different concerns,
but they have had something in common in the past week. They have both
effectively fired their biggest names. This does not seem a sensible business
model, but we are not in sensible times.
GB News is a British news organization across the usual
media formats, and was a breath of the freshest air when it launched in the UK
in 2021. I was almost certainly the first English journalist to cover their
launch for American readers – you can read that here – but my
hope for what was supposed to be the British equivalent of Fox News was sadly
misplaced.
The news channel did not exactly fire the clubbable
Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, but the two have parted company. It looks to me
like a clear case of what British employment law calls ‘constructive dismissal’,
which generally means that an employee that management wants disappeared has a
litany of trumped-up offences apparently committed by the employee which should
have been dealt with independently but are compounded into one big offence. It
is not legal.
Steyn’s onscreen misdemeanors – mostly involving vaccine
skepticism – attracted the attention of OFCOM, the British governmental
organization which supposedly oversees impartiality among broadcasters. GB
News, instead of coming to the rescue of their biggest ratings star, asked him
to sign a new contract under the terms of which he would be personally
responsible for any fines imposed by the regulator.
Now, apart from anything else, this directly contradicts
the British legal principle of vicarious liability. This essentially means that
if you get knocked down by a London bus driver who is still a little drunk from
the night before, you don’t sue the bus driver. You sue the bus company. I would
imagine that a similar statute exists in the USA, although I would imagine it
would be at a state level rather than being federal. I would be interested to
know, if anyone would like to add to the comments.
I have an excellent example of vicarious liability. In
2001 I was a journalist in England, and I was given a press trip, part of which
was a cruise from Vancouver to Alaska. As a journalist, I got to meet the
captain, and we got on well. I asked him, after we had watched whales in the
Inside Passage, what happened when he took a holiday. He told me that he generally
took his family to Mexico. I said, yes, but who captains the ship? He said, a
captain of my choosing from the company. And, I said, God forbid, but what if
the ship sinks or is involved in an accident? Then, he said, it’s my fault. I
go to jail because I chose someone who went on to sink a ship. My ship. Even on
a beach in Mexico, I’m still captain.
Steyn has now left GB News, but still has his own channel
and various sidelines. He was the presenter who had the highest ratings on a
struggling channel. But his effective dismissal is similar to the events at
Project Veritas. This was started by a journalist called James O’Keefe. He
figured recently in a sting operation.
O’Keefe interviewed an alleged Pfizer executive who had some pretty hair-raising
things to say about company policy. He believed he was on a date with a
journalist, and turned psychotic when he realized he has been on the wrong end
of a sting. (Why do people fall for those, in this age of instant recording?)
O'Keefe has now been put on paid leave, apparently for
reasons of mismanagement. I wonder. The tentacles of companies like Pfizer are
long. Did you notice the Grammy awards, and the extraordinary performance by a
creature called Sam Smith? If you were unfortunate enough to, did you notice
who sponsored the Grammys? That’s right. Pfizer.
OFCOM. Pfizer. Two branches of the provisional wing of
global government. And they may have proved that they will force companies such
as GB News and Project Veritas to, as the English say, cut off their nose to
spite their face. Steyn and O’Keefe are influencers, but not in a way of which
the deep state approves. First they came for the content providers…
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