A Free Journalist
Stossel, John
BOOKS IN REVIEW A Free Journalist Give Me A Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.., By John Stossel (HarperCollins, 294 pages,...
...you've got a great and deeply satisfying gig teaching aspiring journalists how to cover government...
...There are fine texts on the techniques of broadcast news, of course, but nothing compares to this for substance...
...But articulate it someone must: The press, to call it what the Founders did, is to serve as a check on the growth of government...
...The alternative would be monotonous, and Stossel rejects that kind of blandness as well...
...MAY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59...
...But he carries the same greatgood sense into sensitive issues such as workplace comportment, where he finds a trainer interpreting sexual harassment laws and prescribing even the blandest behavior...
...Arguments...
...Authorities even discourage debate about it...
...In so doing, they have conferred legitimacy on government control and placed themselves in an ethical dungeon they cannot comprehend...
...Learn he did—ferociously, joyfully...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW A Free Journalist Give Me A Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.., By John Stossel (HarperCollins, 294 pages, $24.95) Reviewed by Kenneth E. Grubbs Jr...
...But Stossel's now a big network star, probably protected in his status precisely because of his contrarian posture...
...And he's right...
...A tip to those who want to toil in the media: The prevalent attitude still, after years of complaints, lost circulation, and decreased market share, is that newswriting can only justify itself if it leads to "change...
...But let's not pretend going to war against behaviors millions of people enjoy will make life better...
...He was surrounded by colleagues who reviled him, but they were forced to put up with him because Stossel had already built his own audience: thoughtful Americans who wanted journalists not so much to warn them about toxins in Kenneth E. Grubbs Jr...
...He did it, paradoxically, by making his bias known...
...I want to laugh, joke, flirt...
...1/41' "Everyone must become bland...
...If you declare your bias in favor of freedom, that means you want the consumers of your reportage to possess all relevant information, the better to make decisions over their own lives...
...The intrusion of the law into every aspect of our lives has sewn confusion about what is appropriate to say or not say and spread insecurity and victimhood among those to whom benign flirtations are directed...
...Willie Williams, Los Angeles's former police chief, said, It's simply wrong, and it should not be even discussed here in America.' "Don't even discuss it...
...Let people condemn...
...Then he applies his deregulationist views consistently into the social and interpersonal realm...
...He builds credibility by not advocating regulations in the social sphere or making the case for "big government conservatism," as some of my best friends have resignedly done...
...He should be studied as' the paradigmatic journalist for our time...
...It makes it worse...
...When he was a fledgling TV reporter, making his mark as a "consumer correspondent," that trendy and perfectly wrongheaded journalistic creation of the 1970s, I had already figured it all out...
...That role is difficult if not impossible for too many of Stossel's colleagues, brought up in a time when the Fourth Estate assumes the role of fourth branch of government, to grasp or articulate...
...Most of Stossel's colleagues have fooled themselves into believing they can be neutral...
...Prestigious journalism awards actually make it a criterion that a reporter's work must have prompted legislation...
...How easily we give up our freedoms...
...That sort of commonsensical comment will, naturally, enrage those who dare not question the need for police intruding into such delicate, spiritual matters as drug addiction...
...HEN I THINK OF JOHN STOSSEL, I confess to an ignoble feeling: jealousy...
...Forget for a moment that in TV news especially a human being cannot report the facts without inflection...
...Stossel has opted for the sunlight...
...What makes this book invaluable is its recovery of an earlier role for journalism...
...Which is why I'm thinking of using Give Me a Break as a textbook...
...It's applicable to ink-stained wretches as well...
...Oh, shut up, Grubbs...
...Stossel rehearses many of the familiar arguments against economic and environmental regulation...
...In America," he writes with disgust for those who would foreclose discussion, "there's little interest in legalizing any drug...
...Stossel has settled, with a few harrumphs, on a libertarian worldview, which enables him to pose questions few other elite journalists will...
...Stossel relishes his opportunity to call such tendencies into question and, yes, make arguments against them...
...It took a few more years of slogging, all entertainingly told here, for Stossel to learn...
...I already knew, as a print reporter cum editorial writer, that on nearly every count freedom worked to the advancement of consumer well-being, whereas intrusive regulation set us all back...
...So Stossel will lose some conservative supporters...
...One seminar participant complained [the trainer's] rules would make the workplace 'cold, unhealthy, less fun.' Yet by seminar's end, [the trainer] had convinced most participants that workplace speech should be censored...
...Everyone must become bland...
...And I, who knew the libertarian truth well before he...
...Is that what an objective reporter/anchor is supposed to be making...
...I don't want to...
...These are the arguments you'll have digested from, say, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, or from Reason, but you're not bloody likely to find them served up so delectably by anyone other than Stossel on one of the non-cable networks...
...He has found a deeper and more authentic objectivity...
...Damn that guy...
...Authorities fear that talking about legalization sends the wrong signal—tells kids we don't think drugs are harmful...
...Stossel pleads...
...We condemn cruelty and hatred without trying to make them illegal...
...He grew into that self-affirming cloak, he says, by reading Reason magazine and studying the late, great Prof...
...Nor should journalists imagine themselves to be neutral conveyers of information between self-government and government control...
...Even today, citizens will reward those parts of the media that champion that which is BOOKS IN REVIEW most meaningful to them: their freedoms...
...He no longer wins Emmys and is all the happier for it...
...58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 their pajamas as about threats to their freedom posed by idiotic lawmakers...
...1 SCHEWING THE "CONSERVATIVE" TAXONOMY, he p averts the trap of being yet another right-wing ....1 jihadist against the liberal media, his subtitle notwithstanding...
...I don't want to...
...Or you can follow John Stossel's example, both riskier and more rewarding...
...You can follow that formula and win an award, at the same time feeding the state's expansive appetites...
...I want to laugh, joke, flirt...
...But that's shortsighted...
...Aaron Wildaysky, whose entertaining lectures "taught me how risk taking makes life safer...
...How easily we give up our freedoms," sighs Stossel...
...is director of the National Journalism Center and editor-in-chief of TheReporterus...
...It is rapidly making life bland and joyless...
...He has made himself a national treasure, one who'd bring a smile to Thomas Jefferson's face...
...Legalizing something doesn't mean we think it's okay...
Vol. 37 • May 2004 • No. 4
