https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/mark_steyn_s_reversal_of_fortune.html
What a difference a year makes.
A year ago, Michael Mann was riding high after winning his 12-year-old lawsuit against journalist and pundit Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg over comments sharply critical of Mann’s famed “hockey stick” graph. That graph purported to demonstrate a sharp rise in global temperature following industrialization, supposedly caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The offending comments were by Steyn in a National Review blog post and by Simberg in a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) blog post.
Mann brought suit against all four, but in 2021 National Review and CEI won “summary judgment” (a peculiar term after nine years of litigation) on the grounds that Steyn and Simberg were “independent contractors,” not employees, and they bore no responsibility for the content of the posts.
In February 2024, a District of Columbia jury ordered Steyn to pay one million dollars in punitive damages to Mann. (Although Steyn’s offense was chiefly to have quoted Simberg, the jury assessed only $1,000 for the latter.)
If Mann was joyous, Steyn was depressed and enraged. He had spent twelve years in what he described as the “dank, fetid, clogged septic tank of DC justice.” The case had ruined his finances and, as he often stated, his life. And at the end, when it finally came to trial, far from being vindicated, he had been slammed with a huge penalty with the potential to destroy the rest of his life, already precarious in the wake of one massive and several lesser heart attacks. An appeal would entail more years and huge additional legal costs.
Buoyed by the verdict, Mann promised to bring National Review and CEI (as institutions, presumably with deeper pockets) back into the case. He said he believed that the summary judgment had been “wrongly decided.” Mann announced, “They’re next.”
One year later, the tables had turned. To understand what happened, it is necessary to know something of the legal underpinnings of the case.