Trouble in Steyn-land

Even if you only casually follow what Mark Steyn is up to now, you might be aware that he tried to make a mark in American Right wing cable TV, only to have his show ended very abruptly, with consequent litigation.

Given that every Right wing commentator in this wide brown land thinks he's terrific, they should be reading this vicious attack on his behaviour by those who had to work with him on the set.

If you think he's a complete jerk for his behaviour towards climate scientists, as I do, you'll find plenty to indicate that his jerk-like behaviour appears to extend well beyond climate science attacks: 

Steyn generally went out of his way to avoid dealing with the crew at all, they say. “We only one time had a meeting with the staff and Mark,” Kullman recalls. “There are many staff members who never even spoke to him.”

Crew members say Steyn often refused to rehearse segments, showed up at the studio minutes before filming was scheduled to begin, and occasionally declined to show up at all, leaving crew members, some of whom had commuted hours to the studio, in the lurch.

Kullman remembers driving two hours through blizzard conditions only to discover that Steyn had canceled the day’s shoot. In a sworn statement, another crew member recalled Steyn emailing employees late at night telling them to come to the studio the next morning for an unscheduled shoot. “When we showed up, Mark Steyn canceled the shoot.”

 Sounds rather like Kevin Rudd, no?   There's more:

“Mark Steyn was incredibly disorganized, often did not show up on scheduled production days, and snuck out of the studio so that nobody would know his whereabouts,” another declaration recalls. “Because of this conduct, it would take a week to shoot an episode instead of the designated day.”

The crew was never given a production schedule, they say. They often didn’t know what they would be shooting until the day of the shoot. Because Steyn would frequently show up last-minute, they were forced to figure out content on the fly. When the inevitable hiccups in production occurred, Steyn would berate crew members who say they simply did not know what he wanted.

On two occasions, those tirades ended with Steyn firing an employee on the spot, according to Kullman’s sworn statement. “Anyone at any moment felt like they could have been fired by him,” he added in his interview.

And this is the funniest part:

When cameras weren’t rolling, crew members say Steyn was almost entirely inaccessible. His offices were on the second floor of the studio facility, and they say Howes, who is Steyn’s publisher in addition to being his spokesperson and an executive on the show, instructed crew members not to approach him there—and, when he entered the studio, not to make eye contact.