He asked the court to step in and prevent CRTV from canceling the contract and forcing him to vacate the studio. He insisted that he had “complied with contractual obligations” and that it was CRTV that had breached the terms. It filed a demand for arbitration and directed Steyn to remove his property from the studio by Feb. 20, the company informed Steyn that his show had been canceled. According to CRTV, he turned in just four. It gave him 10 days to rectify his standing with the company by producing eight full-length episodes. 8, CRTV sent Steyn a breach of contract notice saying that he had not fulfilled its terms. In an email, Howes declined to comment on specific production numbers or the terms of Steyn’s contract but said she was “very confident we have more than met” those terms. 8, CRTV claims, Steyn produced just 11 episodes longer than 40 minutes. Steyn’s deal with CRTV called for five episodes per week, each running one “television hour”-or about 45 minutes to allow for commercial breaks if CRTV opted to sell the rights to the show to a cable provider down the line.įrom Dec. Imagine walking into The Tonight Show,” said Paul Kullman, who ran camera operations on the set. Steyn’s show aired alongside programs hosted by some of the biggest conservative names in media, including talk radio host Mark Levin and author and columnist Michelle Malkin.ĬRTV financed the construction of a television studio in Williston, Vermont, near Steyn’s home in New Hampshire, that crew members described as expensive and sophisticated. When CRTV, an affiliate of the website Conservative Review, took shape in mid-2016, he received top billing. He is currently fighting a libel lawsuit brought by geophysicist Michael Mann over Steyn’s 2012 claim that some of Mann’s academic work on climate change was “fraudulent.” Steyn also successfully fought allegations in Canadian court that some of his criticism of Islam violated Muslims’ human rights. Steyn’s commentary has drawn legal challenges in the past. He is a fierce critic of illegal immigration, refugee resettlement in Europe and the United States, fundamentalist Islam, and political correctness. “It saddens us to hear these allegations,” she said.Ī best-selling author and guest-host of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Steyn is an intellectual leader in the conservative cadres that have ascended with the rise of President Donald Trump’s reactionary populist movement. His spokesperson Melissa Howes denied most of their claims. Steyn did not respond to a request for comment on his former crew members’ allegations. This account is based on sworn declarations, made under penalty of perjury and provided exclusively to The Daily Beast, from nine former Mark Steyn Show employees, and interviews with four of those former employees, three of whom spoke on the record. Steyn had crew members run personal errands, they say, spent CRTV funds on lavish meals and expensive personal purchases, and boasted of the large settlement he planned to extract from the company. In one case Steyn referred to members of the northern Vermont-based crew, a former employee claimed under oath, as “a bunch of meth-heads.” A Steyn spokesperson denied he made that comment. He generally wouldn’t even speak to crew members, they claim, and when he did, he verbally abused them.

His employees tell a different story: They say Steyn ran the show into the ground. Steyn was there, he said, to protect their interests, claims he reiterated on his website: “I didn’t feel the cameramen and production assistants and musicians and audio engineers should have to suffer because I was stupid enough to get into bed with CRTV.”

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