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MORANO

SHILLENBERGER LOMBORG

KOCH LIBTARD CATO CEI HERITAGE HEARTLAND MANHATTAN

SMOKIN GUN?! Convince one of the major news national TV journalists (e.g., John Stossel ) to produce a report examining the scientific underpinnings of the Kyoto treaty.

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OLIN BRADLEY RICH HOWARD

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HOROWITZ

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AI Overview

John Stossel is a prominent libertarian journalist and frequent critic of U.S. climate policy, including the Kyoto Protocol. In his reporting, Stossel has argued against treaties like the Kyoto Protocol, raising the following key points: [1, 2,3]

About the Kyoto Agreement Treaty

Aside from authoring his weekly columns, Williams was a frequent guest host for Rush Limbaugh's radio program when Limbaugh was away traveling. In 2009, Greg Ransom, a writer for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, ranked Williams as the third-most important "Hayekian" Public Intellectual in America, behind only Thomas Sowell and John Stossel.[42] Reason called Williams "one of the country's leading libertarian voices."[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._Williams

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EJ795158

Teacher Education Quarterly, Spring 2007

Stossel in America: A Case Study of the Neoliberal/Neoconservative Assault on Public Schools and Teachers By David Gabbard & Terry Atkinson

The ads ran for weeks amid other notable American Broadcasting Company (ABC) television programming efforts including Lost, Desperate Housewives, and WifeSwap. John Stossel’s 20/20 Report, “Stupid in America: How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education,” promised to shock and awe the American public with details about “What’s going on in American Schools?”

Airing initially on January 13, 2006, Stossel’s scathing diatribe against the public schools offered “insider” film clips within school classrooms, outcries from irate parents, and idyllic stories of charter school settings where students sat dreamily reciting words from phonics charts. Indeed, in the midst of dreadfully sagging primetime ratings, ABC seemingly transformed 20/20’s selfdescribed billing as “one of the most esteemed programs in broadcast journalism” (ABC, 2006) into that of a reality show unlike any other.

Stossel’s critical stance against the public schools was not unfamiliar to the 20/20 audience. He was accused of “destroying trust in public schools” (Bracey, 1999) in a 1999 broadcast purporting the merits of private schools that supposedly gaine

exemplary student outcomes for a fraction of what public schools spent. Taken to task for his unsubstantiated claims after 20/20’s 1999 report was aired, Stossel, again chose to selectively highlight numerous issues that bitterly condemn public schools across America in 20/20’s January 2006 special. Particular issues addressed in the 2006 hour-long broadcast of “Stupid in America: How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education” evoked vocal responses from groups including the National Parent Teacher Association (2006), the National School Boards Association (2006), and the American Federation

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of many television viewers whose contributions to 20/20’s weblogs have been heated and critical (ABC, 2006). Stossel’s website (ABC, 2006) features additional details about the “Stupid” special, as well as information about his new book, Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, released coincidentally in May 2006, several months after the initial 20/20 broadcast. While offering website visitors the opportunity to read free excerpts from his book, direct orders can be placed through Amazon.com.

Further perusal reveals that Chapter Five of Stossel’s new release includes a rehash of public school “myths” featured in the “Stupid in America” broadcast. Additional Stossel website features offer related stories, all supporting his claims about the unfortunate state of public schools. Broadcast journalism standards set by the likes of Edward R. Murrow are strikingly absent as no mention of opposing views or challenges to Stossel’s claims are evident. Bob Edwards argues that primetime broadcast journalists like Stossel have been corrupted by the “profit era” requisite that news reporting has morphed into a money-making venture for television networks.

When news has to make money, the substance, character, and look of the news changes. In the public service era, the networks produced documentaries. In the profit era, documentaries have been replaced by magazine programs heavy on crime, items about celebrities, feel-good features, and the latest trendy disease. These programs have to compete with entertainment programs in prime time. (Edwards, 2006) “Stupid in America”: Myths or Lies? Facts or Fiction? In keeping with Edwards claims, the title of 20/20’s special, “Stupid in America: How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education,” attempted to rivet and entertain viewers with shocking images of American classrooms. Within the first five minutes of airtime video clips document wild students and those arriving at school in drug-induced stupors.

Stossel’s negative agenda emerges quickly—promotion of free-market approaches to educational reform; namely vouchers, tax credits, and privatization. Media Matters for America (2006) characterized Stossel’s coverage as “a series of misleading claims, a lack of balance in reporting and interviews, and video clips apparently created for entertainment to argue for expanding ‘school choice’ initiatives such as vouchers and charter schools.” Blurring the lines between truth and fiction, public school “myths” featured in ABC’s special are cleverly reframed as “lies.”...

:{:{Serfdom, in which he appropriated and applied an pseudo-Darwinian argument to explain that social history reveals a pattern of “natural selection” very similar to that revealed in natural history. Hayek used this argument to contend that only the “fittest” institutions survived. Older and more primitive institutions, he argued, suffered from a “collectivist” or “communal” orientation that inhibited individual liberty. Ignoring the corporate power behind Italian and German fascism, Hayek equated this “collectivist” principle with both fascism and socialism.}:

He used this rhetoric to attack the anti-liberal policies of John Maynard Keynes and Roosevelt’s New Deal, arguing that any form of state intervention or planning would lead society toward fascism. Returning to his theory of social evolution, Hayek contended that history had proven three institutions to be of greatest value to humanity: the family, the church, and the free market. Hayek, of course, recognized that economic liberalism had fallen into disrepute after the Great Depression. To facilitate its restoration and, thereby, to liberate the market from state control, Hayek advocated waging a war of ideas through the carefully planned and calculated use of think tanks such as the Foundation for Economic Education in the United States that provided a model for Hayek’s own Mont Pelerin Society.

As Philip Kovacs and Deron Boyles explain, “think tanks are nonprofit organizations that both produce and rely on research and expertise to aggressively influence the public, political leaders, and policy” (2005, p. 2). Hayek advanced the idea of think tanks as institutions that would assemble and hire scholars dedicated to the resurgence of economic liberalism through a slow but steady effort to establish hegemony for neoliberal ideology over the whole of society. In many regards, Hayek’s proposals appear strikingly similar to Lippmann’s advocacy for the cultivation of a “specialized class” of “responsible men” to manage people’s ideas and perceptions on the world. Chief among those influenced by Hayek’s ideas was British millionaire Antony Fisher, who would go on to create the Institute for Economic Affairs in 1955.

:{:{According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, No single person was more important in encouraging the spread of think tanks than Sir Antony Fisher. An RAF pilot in World War II who went on to become successful in business, Fisher sought advice from Nobel Laureate Fredrich Hayek on how to stop the spread of collectivism and encourage a resurgence of 19th Century classical liberal ideas. Don’t go into politics, Hayek advised. Focus instead on the world of ideas. (Goodman, 2005)}:

Hayek’s ideas also had a lasting influence on Milton Friedman, perhaps the leading American figure in the history of neoliberal economic theory. Students of education, of course, will recognize Friedman as the originator of the idea for school vouchers, a position obviously promoted by Stossel’s “Stupid in America.” Friedman worked closely with Hayek when the latter moved from the London School of Economics to the University of Chicago. With this move, what had once}:}:

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:{:{observed that the chief beneficiaries of economic liberalism, “by a strange absurdity regard the character of the sovereign [the state] as but an appendix to that of the merchant, as something which ought to be made subservient to it” (Smith, p. 277). For Strauss, this is no “strange absurdity” but only the outcome of natural right, wherein the superior few rule over the inferior many. Elite rule by the most successful merchants is not only just, but it is just because the elite possess a natural right to rule by virtue of having demonstrated, through their accumulation of wealth and power, their natural superiority. Justice serves them in conserving their power to rule. Likewise, even the noble lies serve them, for those lies aid in conserving their rule and the stability of social order.}:

:{:{As we shall demonstrate in our final section on Stossel and his connections to them, the think tanks advocated by Hayek have played a vital role in fabricating and distributing noble lies on behalf of economic elites and the advancement of the neoliberal agenda to restore their class power over the state and society. We will also suggest that those same elites perceive the proper role of schools and universities as functioning toward those same ends.}:

:{ The Rise of the Think Tanks

We must acknowledge that institutions such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Hoover Institution, and the Foundation for Economic Education predated and certainly provided prototypes for Hayek’s ideas on how to best restore economic liberalism’s dominance over the state and society. We must also point out that the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society and Fisher’s Institute for Economic Affairs did not generate an overnight proliferation of think tanks.}:}:

That proliferation did not begin until the early 1970s, when leaders in business and government confronted the massive populist movements of the 1960s. The title of Samuel L. Huntington’s entry in the 1973 report of the Trilateral Commission— “The Threat of Democracy”—perhaps best characterizes their perceptions of the high levels of popular activism demonstrated by the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, the consumer protection movement, and the feminist movement among others (see Sklar, 1980).

Each of these movements symbolized, of course, an expression of the same political liberalism that gave rise to Roosevelt’s new deal—the idea that government should respond to needs and concerns of the general population, not just the “minority of the opulent” as dictated by economic liberalism. At the behest of Eugene B. Sydnor, former National Director and, then, Chair of the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Lewis F. Powell wrote a secret memorandum (1971) for the Chamber which many regard as a catalyst for the proliferation of right-wing, neoliberal/neoconservative think tanks over the past 35 years. As a corporate attorney for the tobacco industry, Powell had worked diligently to protect tobacco firms from government regulation. We take no...}:

:{:{:{of economic liberalism deem any form of regulation as an abridgement of the individual’s/corporation’s economic “liberty,” even when that regulation occurs on behalf of the public interest. Powell began his memo by expressing alarm over the “dimensions of the attack” against the “American economic system.” On the one hand, and reflective of his reputation as political moderate, he acknowledged an established American tradition of dissent against that system, even admitting that some criticisms of the system were “wholesome and constructive so long as the objective was to improve rather than to subvert or destroy.” }:

Powell regarded even more severe dissent as safely benign when confined to “a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre.” By 1971, however, the problem of dissent had grown more malignant. No longer confined to a small number of individuals, “the assault on the enterprise system” had, in Powell’s view, become “broadly based and consistently pursued, . . . gaining momentum and converts” (1971). The breadth of the mounting dissent led Powell to address his concern over the “sources of the attack.”}:

:{The malignancy of the problem for Powell rested not in the mere fact that an increasing number of individuals had begun criticizing the “American economic system.” The problem was that it had spread to “perfectly respectable elements of society,” including the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and . . . politicians.” He claimed that this trend was also “increasingly evidenced in the high schools” (ibid).

Powell was particularly concerned over the role of the media and the college campus in providing a platform for anti-corporate dissent, for these institutions play a “predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people” (ibid). He also expressed bewilderment over the paradox that these particular institutions, insofar as they are effectively owned and controlled by corporations, would “tolerate, if not participate in” the destruction of capitalist system. “The campuses,” he wrote, from which much of the criticism emanates are supported by (i) tax funds generated largely from American business, and (ii) contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business. The boards of trustees of our universities overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system.}:

Most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the enterprise system to survive. (ibid) Most revealing of his familiarity with the ideas of Hayek and his associates, in Powell’s discussion of the tone of the attack, he cites two of the leading figures within the neoliberal movement. He first cites Arthur Shenfield’s lectures at Rockford College to support his argument that “members of the intellectual community are waging ideological warfare against the enterprise system and the values of western society” (ibid). Shenfield worked closely with Hayek as a visitin}:

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:{:{:{has always been about good testing. . . . Teaching to the test is fine and dandy, keep on” (Lucadamo, 2006) And if schools and teachers don’t teach to test well enough, if their students don’t meet standards, they expose their schools to the risk of being placed under the management of a private corporation. We should read Stossel’s “Stupid in America” as part of this strategy.}:

John Stossel and the Labyrinth

John Stossel’s transformation into a neoliberal mouthpiece must perplex those who recall his early career in television broadcasting as a strong consumer advocate who was willing to expose business scams and frauds. In public interviews, he explains this transformation as an honest awakening to a new perspective: I had an unusual ringside seat on the regulatory state as a television consumer reporter. . . . I’m a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. }:

It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse. . . . Top-down central planning is never as effective as free individuals making their own choices, because free individuals will adapt to reality every second, but the central planners can adapt only when they get together to vote. (cited in Sigall, 2006) In more private settings, such as during remarks following a speech before the Federalist Society, he gives a different explanation: “I got sick of it [consumer advocacy]. I also now make so much money I just lost interest in saving a buck on a can of peas” (cited in Mokhiber & Robert Weissman, 2004)

Responding to kidding from one of his friends and former colleagues over his change, Stossel said he “liked the idea of making real money. So I started looking at things a little differently.” Another of his colleagues remarked that “they (ABC) let him get away with a lot here”, . . . “but they don’t call him a journalist anymore” (cited in Dowie, 2001/2002).

Stossel has established a consistent pattern over the years of using researchers from the “conservative labyrinth” of think tanks, institutes, and foundations as “experts” to support the ideological message of his reports. His reliance on Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, whose “research” has been discredited by academics such as Gerald Bracey (2005, p. 3), for his arguments in “Stupid in America” offers us a recent case in point. Stossel’s associations with discredited, corporate-sponsored activists such as Greene date back to the 1990s. In 1997, for example, he relied on Michael Fumento, a Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute, to make his case against governmental environmental regulation (see}:

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:{:{“Scooter” Libby, the former former Chief of Staff and assistant for National Security Affairs to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and who is now under indictment by a federal grand jury for his involvement in the Valerie Plame affair, it also lists the Center for Global Food Issues as one of its many projects. Apart from having originated an “Earth Friendly, Farm Friendly” product label that the Union of Concerned Scientists decribes as falsely implying “sustainable food production” (see SourceWatch, n.d.A).}:

This Center also receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from giant agribusinesses such as DuPont, Proctor & Gamble, ConAgra, and Monsanto. When Business Week (Javers, 2006) revealed that Monsanto had paid Fumento to write a book favorable to its biotechnology interests, Scripps Howard News Service announced that it was dropping Fumento’s column. He remains a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, which has also supported the work of school-voucher advocates such as Denis Doyle, John Chubb, Terry Moe, and Chester Finn. In 2000, the Center for Global Food Issues’ Dennis Avery supplied Stossel with his primary source material for “The Food You Eat”—an industry-friendly attack on organic foods (see Dowie, 2001/2002B).

When Stossel cited a non-existent study to support his claim that neither conventional nor organic foods contained residue from pesticides, he came under heavy fire from the Organic Trade Group and the Environmental Working Group. Because of his flagrant violation of ABC’s editorial policies, the network forced Stossel to issue an on-air apology to his audience. Sensing that their media-star was in trouble, the Competitive Enterprise Institute created a “Save John Stossel” website (see Borowski, 2002) to help him keep his job and warn their supporters that “‘politically correct causes and special interests’” were threatening Stossel’s “‘free speech rights’” (cited in Berkowitz, 2006).

In that same year, perhaps to bolster his damaged reputation, the American Legislative Exchange Council named Stossel the recipient of its Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. A year later the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) would once again come to Stossel’s aid as he was putting together a report entitled “Tampering With Nature,” which Marianne Manilov (2001) accurately described as “part of a fiveyear right-wing effort to discredit and defund environmental education.”

Stossel’s problems with this show began when Michael Sanera, director of CEI’s Orwelliannamed Center for Environmental Education Research sent an email to members of Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment that read: A producer for John Stossel is working on a program on environmental education. He needs examples of kids who have been ‘scared green’ by schools teaching doomsday environmentalism in the classroom. ... He has some examples, but needs more. Would you send out a notice to your group and ask if they know of some examples. Then contact Mr. Sanera ... Let’s try to hel....}:

:{:{Stossel’s troubles only deepened. As reported by SourceWatch: Apparently neither Stossel nor CEI applied similar standards of fairness toward the schoolteachers and students they interviewed. Prior to the program’s air date in July, several California parents of children interviewed by Stossel filed a complaint with ABC, stating that they had been misled about the nature of the program and the types of leading questions their kids would be asked. Seattle teacher John Borowski also reported being approached by ABC producer Ted Balaker, who attempted to trick him into appearing on camera by claiming that he was making a documentary about Earth Day, while denying that he was working with Stossel and Sanera. (cited in Berkowitz, 2006)}:

:{ :{Everyone who cares about the future of our schools needs to be aware of the heavy influence of neoliberal think tanks on Stossel’s “reporting” and the sorts of reforms promoted through programs such as “Stupid In America.” In all likelihood, he will continue his attacks on public schools as part of the previously-mentioned neoliberal strategy of pressuring schools to teach to high-stakes tests or risk having their schools placed under the management of a private corporation. }:

For neoliberals, this presents a win-win situation. So long as teachers succeed in maintaining satisfactory test scores by teaching only to the tests—and even sometimes from scripted lesson plans aligned with the tests—they will have little opportunity to engage students in activities that might be destructive of their allegiance to the corporate order. If they fail to maintain satisfactory test scores, this failure serves to rationalize handing over the management of schools directly to private corporations.}:

By 2014-2015, when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act comes up for full reauthorization by Congress, we can expect to hear arguments for the complete privatization of America’s public schools. In this event, teachers will cease functioning as public servants and become corporate employees. Stripped of what little professional autonomy they now retain, they will be made to teach a corporate-approved curriculum in accordance with a corporate model of instruction. Not only does the work of John Stossel give us great cause for concern over the future of journalistic standards, but for curriculum standards as well.

With the help of the Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Foundation, and the Palmer R. ChitesterFund, many of Stossel’s programs are packaged and sold to more than 200 public and private schools as curriculum materials. According to Media Transparency, The Palmer R. Chitester Fund is a 501-c-3 public foundation doing business as In the Classroom Media and Free to Choose Media. Its emphasis is on examining the relationship of economic, personal, and political freedom. In the Classroom Media is currently distributing selected television specials by John Stossel for classroom use.}:

:{:{...Syndicated columnist and John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Walter E. Williams serves as one of Chitester’s board members. Not only is Williams a significant on-air presence in the “Stossel in the Classroom” videos, he also oversees the work of two full-time visiting professors, Thomas Rustici and Alan Koczela, who create the classroom materials for the series. David Mastio (2000) writes that “many, if not most, of the 35 to 40 footnotes accompanying each guide cite predictably conservative sources like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Young Americas Foundation and the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages.”}:

One of his early producers lamented that “the sad thing about Stossel and his ascendancy is that he is the future. He symbolizes the transformation of news into ideological entertainment” (Dowie, 2001/2002A). Those of us in teacher education, having already suffered the loss of NCATE’s commitment to “social justice” under pressure from those pushing the neoliberal/ neoconservative agenda, must face the possibility that he might also symbolize the pending transformation of education into corporate indoctrination.

Conclusion: What’s at Stake?

:{:{ Given that teacher educators comprise the target audience of this journal, the editors naturally expect us to address the ramifications that our analysis holds for teacher education. We know that pressures from inside the labyrinth led the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) to remove any mention of “social justice” from its standards (see Powers, 2006). Those pressures came from the National Association of Scholars, which is home to some of the major figures in the neoliberal/neoconservative movement, including Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, and Chester Finn.}:

Those pressures also came from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, “a major proponent of the ‘intellectual diversity’ movement which aims to dismantle the so-called liberal bias in higher academia.” David Horowitz, of course, serves as the leading figure of this movement from his Center for the Study of Popular Culture at the Hoover Institution. He regularly appears on FoxNews, which functions as the primary propaganda arm for the neoliberal/neoconservative agenda. The pressure on NCATE to drop its commitment to social justice also stemmed from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an institution founded by Lynne V. Cheney, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney.

In November of 2001, ACTA issued a report titled “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It’ that launched what Joel Beinin describes as “The first post-September 11 expression of the link between the neoconservative political agenda and the attack on critical thinking about the Middle East” (Beinin, n.d.) In Beinin’s words,}:}:

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:{:{war on Afghanistan on campuses across the country was tantamount to negligence in ‘defending civilization’ and proof that ‘our universities are failing America.’ ACTA alleged that American universities were brought to this sorry state by inadequate teaching of Western culture and American history. Consequently, students and faculty did not understand what was at stake in the fight against terrorism and were undermining the defense of civilization by asking too many questions.}:

The original version of ‘Defending civilization’ named and quoted comments by 117 university faculty members, staff, and students in reaction to the September 11 attacks. ACTA’s ire was aroused by my statement that, ‘If Usama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.’ Other remarks in the report’s list of unacceptable speech included ‘Ignorance breeds hate’ and ‘[T]here needs to be an understanding of why this kind of suicidal violence could be undertaken against our country.’ (ibid) All three of these organizations that pressured NCATE receive significant funding from the same Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation that support “Stossel in the Classroom.”

Our point in this article has been to demonstrate how the attack on public schools represents a small part of a much larger attack on the public and its role in a liberal, constitutional democracy. David Harvey (2005) has characterized neoliberalism as a project aimed at the restoration of class power. When we take the neoconservative elements of that project into account, we might more accurately describe it as being aimed at the restoration of total class domination.

While we laud the open letters written to ABC in protest of Stossel’s “Stupid in America” by the National Parent Teachers Association (2006) and the National School Boards Association (2006), as well as the report issued by the American Federation of Teachers, we would urge everyone concerned with the future of our schools to look beyond John Stossel. As we said at the outset and, hopefully, have demonstrated, Stossel serves as an agent of a larger agenda, but he is not its source.

To borrow a phrase from Walter Lippmann, Stossel has assumed a role as one of the “responsible men.” In Straussian terms, he has come to appreciate the notion that justice derives from satisfying the interests of the powerful. We would hope that teachers and teacher educators everywhere can now understand that the neoliberal/neoconservative agenda places more than the future of public schools at risk.

As Michael Parenti has written, When the power of capital is increasingly untrammeled, all of us are put at risk: the environment, the sacred forests, the beautiful and mysterious creatures of the sea, the ordinary people who, with their strength and brains and inventiveness create community and give to life so much that’s worthy of our respect. The real burden to society is not the poor, but the corporate rich. We simply can no longer afford them. Conservatives complain whenever we fight back; they say we’re engaging in ‘class war.’ Well, I believe it is class war, but I also have another name for it. When people unite against the abuses of wealth and privilege, when they activate themselves and}:

:{:{...militantly attack the hypocrisies and lies of the powers that be, when they fight back and become the active agents of their own destiny, when they withdraw their empowering responses and refuse to toe that line, I call that ‘democracy.’ (1995, p. 6)}:

We agree with Parenti that, in light of all we see happening around us and to us, we must all “get a lot angrier and a lot more determined. They want everything, and everything is at stake. Many people are getting angry; our job is to see that they direct their anger at the real perpetrators of their misery, and not against the very people who want to make common cause with them” (ibid). In order to do this, those of us in teacher education need to “call them out” and reveal the anti-school movement for what it is. The question is, will we find the courage to do so? References}:

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Video: John Stossel and GLP's Jon Entine on the faux bee-apocalypse—How ...

Genetic Literacy Project

“We're not facing a honeybee or insect apocalypse as so many activists claim and the media misreports,” says Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy ...

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BUNK! Why Most of Robert Reich’s Ideas Are Just Wrong John Stossel

587K views 8 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoACN6M7YvU)

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Michael Shellenberger

For the last 20 years, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that his social media company is the “digital equivalent of a town square,” committed to factual accuracy, and protecting the natural environment.

But now, Facebook is censoring accurate information about the relationship between industrial wind energy development and the increase in whale deaths off the East Coast.

Yesterday, Facebook and Instagram censored my post linking whale deaths to wind energy off the East Coast of the United States. The censorship came in the form of a “FactCheck.org” article from March 31, 2023, which relied entirely on U.S. government sources.

The censorship came on the exact same day that Public and Environmental Progress released anew documentary, “Thrown To The Wind,” which proves that the FactCheck.org article is false.

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“Thrown To The Wind” presents powerful new scientific evidence that the wind industry is responsible for the increase in whale deaths and that U.S. government agencies are either covering up the evidence or have failed to do the research that is described in the film.

Facebook last year defended its censorship by saying its “fact-checks” are just “opinion” and thus immune from defamation lawsuits, like the one brought by former ABC News correspondent John Stossel.

But that means that Facebook is spreading disinformation. By “disinformation,” I mean information that the person knows to be false. Facebook knows its “fact checks” are just their “opinion.” Thus, labeling FactCheck.org, which in this case is simply repeating US government misinformation, as a “fact-checker” is disinformation.

And the consequences are serious. According to Facebook, “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution … We … apply a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article, disproving the claim.”

Why is that? Why is Facebook censoring accurate information and spreading disinformation? And how can we fight back?

Please subscribe now to support our investigative reporting, our fight against censorship, and our defense of the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whales.

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Facebook’s Renewable Energy Investments...pix

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google demonetized The Heartland Institute in June. Here are 4 more channels that appear to violate its misinformation policy.

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 07/31/24

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https://www.facebook.com/jeffreytucker.official  brownstone  epoch times

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https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1686948485040525

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/24/2130859/-Google-s-Selling-Climate-Disinfo-Ads-Despite-Policy-Against-It-YouTube-Too-Still

Google's Selling Climate Disinfo Ads, Despite Policy Against It. YouTube, Too. Still.

Daily Kos

Hate speech test case Mark Steyn interviewing pro-J6-insurrection Marc Morano and debunked-by-deniers Monckton about their recent invitation to be ...

...In October of 2021, Google announced that it was banning climate disinformation from its advertising system, including on YouTube. That (should have) meant videos denying the scientific reality that fossil fuels are causing climate change shouldn't have ads on them, and websites that publish such false claims would also be barred from using Google's ad services.

In October of 2022, it's still all too easy to find climate disinformation on YouTube that's selling ads. 

FoxNews clips that get fact checked? Still monetized. UK's version of Fox, GBNews, having a PR exec turned professional denier on to say the "'UK Government has been taken over by sleeper agents"? Making ad money.Hate speech test case Mark Steyn interviewing pro-J6-insurrection Marc Morano and debunked-by-deniers Monckton about their recent invitation to be a laughing stock? Monetized! Amateur that depends on professionals Tom Nelson's podcast videos, Alex Epstein on Glenn Beck, John Stossel tapping deceased denier Pat Michaelsto deny hurricane science, and our favorite, the canonically bad climate denial video, the Great Global Warming Swindle, that Avaaz called out in 2020, are all monetized.

And that's just on YouTube! There's also Google's sprawling advertising display business. Google gets paid to place ads on websites across the internet. Its policy against climate disinformation should mean that it doesn't place ads on websites that publish climate disinformation. And the company should care about that, because big name advertisers are very clear about not wanting their products to appear next to the casual bigotry, hatred and lies found on websites that carry climate disinformation.

But apparently a year is still not enough time for Google to actually enforce its demonetization policy, because a new report from Dewey Square Group found Google "is by far the most significant advertising supplier on websites that promote climate disinformation both in terms of the share of sites they enable and the ad traffic they monetize."

Using weekly visits as the metric, of the total 113 websites analyzed, Google ads accounted for 97.7% of the projected weekly visits. Assuming an average price, "Google would potentially have pulled in $7.6 million in display advertising revenue over the past year from such sites" the report states.

Of the top 50 climate disinfo websites by traffic, like Breitbart and The Dailies Wire and Caller, Dewey analysts found that Google was serving ads on 39 of them.

Not only is Google still monetizing climate disinfo, it's the biggest player in the game, and it's working with the biggest, most obvious publishers of harmful climate denial. 

Despite its own rule saying it explicitly would not do that. Apparently it’s less of a policy, and more of a request...

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 October of 2022, it's still all too easy to find climate disinformation on YouTube that's selling ads. FoxNews clips that get fact checked:{? }Still monetized:{. UK's version of Fox, GBNews, having }:a PR exec:{ turned }:professional denier:{ on to say the "'UK Government has been taken over by sleeper agents"? }Making ad money:{. Hate speech test case Mark Steyn interviewing pro-J6-insurrection Marc Morano and debunked-by-deniers Monckton about their recent }:invitation to be a laughing stock:{? }Monetized:{! Amateur that depends on professionals }:Tom Nelson:{'s podcast }videos:{, Alex Epstein }on Glenn Beck:{, John Stossel tapping deceased denier Pat Michaels to }deny hurricane science:{, and our favorite, the }:canonically bad climate denial video:{, }the Great Global Warming Swindle:{, that }:Avaaz called out in 2020:{, are all monetized.}:

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https://www.todayville.com/category/opinion/john-stossel/page/2/

don’t miss a single video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://www.johnstossel.com/#subscribe

Libertarian journalist John Stossel created Stossel TV to explain liberty and free markets to young people. Prior to Stossel TV he hosted a show on Fox Business and co-anchored ABC’s primetime newsmagazine show, 20/20. Stossel’s economic programs have been adapted into teaching kits by a non-profit organization, “Stossel in the Classroom.” High school teachers in American public schools now use the videos to help educate their students on economics and economic freedom. They are seen by more than 12 million students every year.

Stossel has received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Other honors include the George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting and the George Foster Peabody Award

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ISD report 2022

...jOHN STOSSEL

On the other side of the spectrum is John Stossel. Starting his career as a primetime TV host on ABC’s 20/20 segment, he sparked controversy for using child interviewees to push an anti-environmental stance. Stossel transitioned to Fox Business News from 2009-2016, after which his own production company became one of the top contractors for the Charles Koch Institute. The company secured over $1.5 million in Koch contracts from 2017-2019, in addition to nearly $500,000 of Koch donations to Stossel’s non-profit. He is currently suing Facebook for defamation after a fact checker debunked one of his posts, stating it contained a video with active climate disinformation. This has resulted in a reduction of ad revenue and traffic to his page. However, on Twitter Stossel received the highest average interaction per post among the 16 key accounts monitored. His 9 posts about COP26 drew an average of 905 interactions each - three times greater than the average (though this is likely due to his sparse posting relative to others, rather than any inherent quality of his content.) [twt pix]

On 1 November, as COP26 officially began in Glasgow, Stossel posted a “Paris Climate Fraud” video that amassed over 300,000 views on Twitter. Three days later, he tweeted a video of a panel presentation he hosted in 2019, organised by the polluter-funded and frequently fact checked Heartland Institute. It featured Patrick Michaels, who once guessed that around 40% of his research funding came from fossil fuels;David Legates,whose climate denial led him to be reassigned under the Trump administration; and Willie Soon, who in 2015 was outed by the New York Times for receiving over a million dollars from the fossil fuel industry to produce climate disinformation. 

This lineup of climate deniers was not new, and the video itself had already been fact checked by ClimateFeedback where it was rated to have “very low” credibility and said to use “imprecise language that misleads viewers about the scientific understanding of climate change”. However, since Twitter lacks a climate disinformation policy that would recognise and action fact checks, the clip could once again gain traction online. On 1 November, Stossel also posted a video to Facebook which has garnered over 900,000 views and frames nuclear energy as “the ONLY technology” which could help mitigate climate change. The clip once again repurposed old content which had already been fact-checked, featuring individuals who create and/or propagate climate disinformation regularly...

stossel has not slowed down with his climate disinformation efforts since COP26. On 30 November 2021, he posted a YouTube video attacking Poynter, the highly esteemed journalism institution that oversees the fact checking organisations used by Facebook (including ClimateFeedback). The transcript of the video was quickly picked up by right-wing and/or polluter-funded outlets like the Daily Signal, Heartland, TownHall and PatriotPost. In it, Stossel interviews other figures known for spreading anti-science misinformation: a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, as well as Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg who are covered in further detail below.

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https://grassrootbeer.substack.com/

i've been corresponding with lawyers from Koch Industries and the Stand Together Chamber of Commerce in recent weeks, as they answer my requests for IRS tax filings from organizations controlled by Charles Koch.

Beyond the dizzying complexity of how these 50+ organizations and companies are structured, there’s one tidbit in particular that caught my eye:

John Stossel is one of Charles Koch’s top contractors.

Each year since 2017, John Stossel’s company, JFS Productions, received a half million dollars to do media contract work for the Charles Koch Institute.

From 2017-2019, Koch payments to JFS Productions total $1,541,715.

These screenshots link to the source documents:

2019:

2018:

2017:

New York’s business registry lists the address of “John Stossel, Inc.” as affiliated with JFS Productions.

John Stossel’s written opinion columns often list “JFS Productions” at the bottom.

(JFS = John Frank Stossel.)

These consulting payments are in addition to $397,688 from Charles Koch’s foundations to John Stossel’s nonprofit, the Center for Independent Thought (CIT), from 2007-2019, including a $72,688 payment disclosed in the 2019 Charles Koch Foundation 990.

The 2019 IRS 990s for the Charles Koch Institute and Charles Koch Foundation were first published by David Armiak at the Center for Media and Democracy in late November.

John Stossel shifts into Koch career

John Stossel used to be a primetime TV host, on ABC’s 20/20. He sometimes made his colleagues uncomfortable when he blurred the lines between journalism and opinionated punditry. He liked to interview children for his segments, landing him in hot water when parents accused him of manipulating their kids in order to dismiss environmental concerns.

Stossel moved from ABC to the FOX Business Network in 2009.At FOX, Stossel continued to attack the validity of environmental problems.

He hosted anti-environmental “experts,” like The Heartland Institute’s Jay Lehr, who accused the US. Environmental Protection Agency of its “fraudulent” efforts to assert that air pollution still kills people. Nobody disclosed that Lehr spent three months in prison for defrauding the EPA.

In 2016, Stossel left FOX for new ventures, including with the Charles Koch Institute’s journalism fellowship program. Stossel continued to produce reassuring, paternalistic political videos on YouTube, called Stossel TV, via the Center for Independent Thought (CIT).

Stossel also took on a role atReasonTV through the Reason Foundation. Reason counted the late David Koch as a trustee for many years, until shortly before Koch’s death in August, 2019.

The Reason Foundation has received $3,927,322 from Koch foundations since 1997,including $9,813 from the Charles Koch Foundation (see p. 55 and p. 59) and $31,750 from the Charles Koch Institute in 2019.

But it’s the Koch Institute’s direct contracts with JFS Productions that indicate how Charles Koch’s wealth is a major factor in John Stossel’s post-TV career.

JFS Productions Praise for Koch

JFS Productions is responsible for Stossel’s written opinion columns that are printed in outlets all over the country. He has used his platform to defend the Koch brand, including this article from January, 2017, the year that the Charles Koch Institute began reporting half-million-dollar payments to JFS Productions.

Stossel was at it before that, too. “I wish the Kochs spent more on politics,” he said in a JFS Productions syndicated commentary from 2015, which was published by FOX News.

These are big contracts. Nonprofits filing 990s with the IRS are only required to list the top five contractors, and only for payments exceeding $50,000.

If JFS Productions wasn’t among the top five contractors in previous years, then no disclosure was required. And if Koch Industries pays John Stossel directly, that information is not disclosed.

Koch Industries, Climate, and Stossel

John Stossel lists problems he claims were overblown, in introduction to a Stossel TV clip titled “Are We Doomed?” 2019.

Knowing that Stossel is directly contracting for the Charles Koch Institute puts some of his work into a new context.

Koch Industries is defending itself in a Minnesota district court after MN Attorney General Keith Ellison named Koch in a lawsuit against oil companies that he says misled the public on matters of climate change science.

John Stossel has been a consistent critic of climate scientists and advocates for policy solutions to climate change.

Any climate policy rooted in science means reducing fossil fuel consumption quickly and dramatically. Rather than accept the nuanced conclusions of 97% of peer-reviewed research from thousands of scientists from numerous countries and institutions have determined, Stossel features simplistic and contradictory opinions of a handful of people who tend to work at Koch-funded organizations.

In November, 2019, John Stossel wrote an article on “Climate Myths” featuring two scientists who have admitted to taking money from fossil fuel companies.

Patrick Michaels is one of those people. Michaels has been paid by fossil fuel companies and downplaying climate change for longer than I have been walking.

For most of his recent career, Michaels worked at the Cato Institute. Cato was founded by Charles Koch, and it remains governed in part by a prominent Koch Industries alumna.

Koch foundations have provided Cato with $16,510,861 in funding since 1997, including 11 payments totaling $2,391,093 from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2019, and $26,000 from the Charles Koch Institute in 2019.

Stossel’s “Climate Myths” article was published six months after Michaels was pushed out of Cato, but Michaels was a repeat guest on Stossel’s various television and video programs during his Cato years. Michaels now holds fellowships at the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Koch-funded CO2 Coalition.

Stossel’s 2019 column and video also featured Willie Soon, whose expertise apparently ranges from astrophysical solar variability, to polar bear biology, to mercury pollution and public health.

The common theme for Dr. Soon’s sprawling scientific expertise seems to be that his research always concludes that climate change and pollution are not concerning. That research tends to be funded by fossil fuel interests, including Charles Koch, ExxonMobil, Southern Company, and pass-through piggy banks used to keep donors anonymous.

The 2019 “Climate Myths” column accompanied a Stossel TV video on YouTube called “Are We Doomed?” The clip attempts to undermine climate change science and questions celebrity climate advocates, likeGreta Thunberg and Al Gore. Stossel’s counter-experts included the usual suspects, Patrick Michaels, Willie Soon, and David Legates.

[Soon, Michaels, and Legates, in Stossel TV’s 2019 video, “Are We Doomed?”]

Stossel continues to produce anti-climate columns and videos.

Just last month—November, 2020—Stossel did another column and video segment, promoting a climate denial “documentary” created by the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which occasionally receives Charles Koch’s money.

And back in August, 2020, Stossel did a video called“Thank You, Fossil Fuels,” packaged with a written column that attacked the concept of “environmental racism,” following widespread racial justice protests over George Floyd’s disturbing murder by Minneapolis police.

Koch Industries owns dozens of polluting facilities located near communities that are disproportionately inhabited by people of color.

The 2020 video featured yet another spokesperson at yet another Koch-funded organization, Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute, which has received $3,352,537 from Koch foundations since 1997, including a $100,000 grant in 2019.

Now, the key question is:

What exactly is being produced by JFS Productions for the Charles Koch Institute?

This is my first research post for Grassrootbeer Investigations. Thanks for reading!

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desmog

If you’re John Stossel and you want to host a segment to rail against the US Environmental Protection Agency, who ought you call?

It turns out, a man who was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison for defrauding the EPA!

Stossel’s guest last night, Jay Lehr, was sentenced to six months–serving three–in a minimum security federal prison back in 1991, and his organization at the time was fined $200,000. So Jay Lehr knows about EPA corruption better than anyone: he was the guy caught “falsifying employee time sheets on a government contract” for EPA, according to the Columbus Dispatch,

[pix]

Ironically, Lehr told Stossel that EPA is “fraudulent” in estimates of amounts of pollution that pose hazards to people’s health, such as particulate matter in coal pollution, estimated to prematurely kill 13,000 Americans every year, according to the American Lung Association.

Jay Lehr is now the “science director” at a climate chance science denying organization called The Heartland Institute, which has received money from coal mining company Murray Energy.

John Stossel did not mention Lehr’s fraud conviction. Perhaps he didn’t know his guest defrauded US taxpayers, but Stossel and Lehr share a flair for denial of global warming for polluting corporations like Koch Industries, which has financial ties to both men. Heartland is part of the Koch brothers-funded [State Policy Network](http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/state-policy-network-spn/?utma=1.834972712.1309880319.1345044157.1345047894.336&utmb=1.6.10.1345047894&utmc=1&utmx=-&utmz=1.1345047894.336.247.utmcsr=google|utmccn=%28organic%29|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=%28not%20provided%29&utmv=-&__utmk=19481784)–the massive apparatus of state-based and national front groups that push political agendas that are favorable to billionaire executives like Charles Koch. Heartland itself has received money from Koch foundations.

Stossel hosts “Stossel in the Classroom,” a product of the Koch-funded Center for Independent Thought. When Stossel ran a TVsegment in 2009 that was intended to mislead students about the scientific reality of climate change, Koch’s Claude Lambe Foundation gave CIT $35,000. The Center for Independent Thought has continued to receive money from Koch foundations every year since, according to IRS tax filings.

According to a Heartland Institute email advertising Lehr’s attendance on Stossel’s show, Mr. Lehr’s relevance in attacking the EPA comes from a Heartland report he wrote urging the agency to be “systematically dismantled.” This coming from a group soliciting money from coal company Murray Energy, former ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol and the Charles Koch Foundation.

This all fits into the framework that is becoming nauseatingly familiar to American voters: billionaires pull the strings, and our voices don’t matter. Stossel is just one of many Koch-funded or Koch friendly media personalities that wrap Charles Koch’s values in patriotic rhetoric and un-factual packaging. Meanwhile, people like Jay Lehr at groups like Heartland continue to carry Koch’s water into the policy arena, influencing politicians to do things like undermine enforcement of laws to reduce air and water pollution or mitigate dangerous climate change.

Source: David Lore, “Minimum Security, Maximum Cost: State Spends $53,000 Per Prison Bed to House Mostly Nonviolent Criminals,” Columbus Dispatch (Ohio) September 6, 1992.

USA V. LEHR, ET AL, Case Number: 2:91-CR-00068, Charges Filed 04/26/1991, U.S. District Court Southern District of Ohio.

Hat tip to Deep Climate, Russel Seitz and Thomas Miles for leading to primary sources on Jay Lehr’s conviction. Video courtesy Crooks and Liars.

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https://blog.ucsusa.org/elliott-negin/exxonmobil-still-funding-climate-science-denier-groups

2x?

Why is ExxonMobil Still Funding Climate Science Denier Groups?

ELLIOTT NEGIN, SENIOR WRITER | AUGUST 31,2018,

A decade after pledging to end its support for climate science deniers, ExxonMobil gave $1.5 million last year to 11 think tanks and lobby groups that reject established climate science and openly oppose the oil and gas giant’s professed climate policy preferences, according to the company’s annual charitable giving report released this week.

Nearly 90 percent of ExxonMobil’s 2017 donations to climate science denier groups went to the US Chamberof Commerce and three organizations that have been receiving funds from the company since it started bankrolling climate disinformation 20 years ago: the American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute and American Legislative Exchange Council, which — in a surprise move — ExxonMobil recently quit. (More on that later.)

The other ExxonMobil denier grantees last year were the Center for American and International Law($23,000), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000), National Taxpayers Union Foundation ($40,000), and Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).

ExxonMobil’s funding priorities belie the company’s purported support for a carbon tax, the Paris climate agreement and other related policies, which it reaffirmed in a January blog post by its public affairs director, Suzanne McCarron. If, as McCarron claims, ExxonMobil is “committed to being part of the solution,” why is the company still spending millions of dollars a year on groups that are a major part of the problem?

ExxonMobil’s history of deceit

There is ample evidence that Exxon was fully aware of the danger its products pose to the planet since the 1980s and likely even earlier. Nonetheless, the company helped initiate a fossil fuel industry-backed climate disinformation campaign in 1998, a year before it merged with Mobil.

The company’s behind-the-scenes role went largely unnoticed for nearly a decade, but in early 2007, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that it had spent at least $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to fund a network of more than 40 think tanks and advocacy groups to manufacture doubt about climate science under the guise of being neutral, independent analysts.

In response to the negative press generated by the UCS report, ExxonMobil vowed in its “2007 Corporate Citizenship Report” to “discontinue contributions [in 2008] to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Note that the company only promised to stop funding several policy groups, not all, and it did in fact drop some high-profile grantees, including the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and Institute for Energy Research. But it never completely ended its support for the disinformation network. From 1998 to 2007 — the year of the pledge — it spent nearly $23 million on it. From 2008 through last year, it spent another $13.17 million, for a total of $36.13 million over the last 20 years. As far as anyone has been able to determine from publicly available data, only Charles and David Koch, the multibillionaire owners of Koch Industries, have spent more to deceive the public about climate science and block government action on climate change.

Last year, $1.35 million of the $1.5 million ExxonMobil spent went to the following four organizations:

US Chamber of Commerce: Sponsoring slanted studies

In 2014, ExxonMobil committed to give $5 million to the US Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign in $1 million-a-year increments on top of its annual dues, despite the lobby group’s history of misrepresenting climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year, the company kicked in another $15,000 for the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total donation to $1,015,000.

If one takes ExxonMobil’s climate policy claims at face value, the Chamber’s positions are polar opposite.

ExxonMobil has been very vocal about its support for the Paris climate agreement, for example, and during its former CEO Rex Tillerson’s brief stint as US secretary of state, he reportedly implored President Trump to keep the United States in it. What did Trump cite last year when he announced he was pulling out of the accord? A widely debunked report from the US Chamber of Commerce.

Cosponsored by a former ExxonMobil grantee — the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) —the report maintained that the Paris accord would cost the US economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades and eliminate 6.5 million industrial sector jobs by 2040.

According to analyses by the Associated Press (AP), Politifact and The Washington Post, however, the Chamber and ACCF cooked the books. As the AP put it: “The study makes worst-case assumptions that may inflate the cost of meeting US targets under the Paris accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to US businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects.”

American Enterprise Institute: Undue faith in the market

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an 80-year-old free-market think tank in Washington, D.C., has received more from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2017, ExxonMobil gave AEI $160,000, bringing its total to $4.49 million since 1998.

Economist Benjamin Zycher, the only AEI staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, rejects mainstream climate science, insists a carbon tax would be “ineffective,” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He not only disagrees with ExxonMobil’s professed climate policy positions, he has attacked the company for taking them.

Zycher’s colleague Mark Thiessen, a regular contributor to The Washington Post, also dismisses the Paris accord, maintaining that “free enterprise, technology, and innovation—not pieces of parchment signed in Paris and Kyoto — will revolutionize how we produce and consume energy.” Never mind that it often takes regulations to drive innovation and force corporations to adopt cleaner technology. Without federally mandated air pollution controls, for example, power plants and other industrial facilities would be emitting considerably more toxic pollution than they do today.

Manhattan Institute: Propaganda masquerading as news

Another free-market think tank, the Manhattan Institute, received $115,200 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, it has received $1.25 million. Like Zycher and Thiessen at AEI, Manhattan Institute fellows oppose a carbon tax and the Paris accord.

Earlier this year, the New York City-based organization hired longtime TV newsman John Stossel, former host of Fox Business Network’s “Stossel” and ABC’s “20/20,” to interviewManhattan Institute Senior Fellow Oren Cass for a slickly produced, 4-minute YouTube segment titled “The Overheated Costs of Climate Change.”

Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, told Stossel that the Paris climate agreement “was somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” Stossel wholeheartedly agreed. “The Earth is warming,” Stossel intoned in his wrap-up. “Man may well be increasing that. But the solution isn’t to waste billions by forcing emissions cuts here while other countries do nothing. Well, pretend to make cuts. Trump was right to repudiate this phony treaty.”

Waste billions while other countries do nothing? Besides the fact that it is now cheaper to produce electricity from utility-scale solar and wind energy in the United States than nuclear, coal and even natural gas, as of last November — a year after the Paris agreement officially went into effect — China, India and other major carbon emitters were already making significant progress in meeting their Paris accord commitments.

The other glaring problem with the segment is it’s a prime example of fake news. With a former network news show host playing anchor, viewers could easily mistake the piece as a clip from of a legitimate newscast. At least one member of the conservative echo chamber treated it that way. The Washington Free Beacon, an online news organization funded by GOP megadonor Paul Singer, ran a news story about the Stossel-Cass interview on March 19.

American Legislative Exchange Council: Fossil fuel industry ‘bill mill’

On July 12, ExxonMobil announced it had ended its longtime membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council after a disagreement over the corporate lobby group’s climate policy. From 1998 through last year — when Exxon Mobil reported it gave the group $60,000 — ALEC received $1.93 million from the oil company.

Over the last two decades, ALEC has routinely featured climate science deniers at its conferences and supplied state lawmakers with a range of fossil fuel industry-drafted sample legislation, including bills that would restrict investment in renewables, eliminate incentives for electric vehicles, and hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to residential and business customers.

Since 2012, more than 100 corporations, including BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and electric utilities Entergy, Pacific Gas & Electric and Xcel Energy, have severed ties with ALEC, in many cases because of its regressive policy positions.

ExxonMobil’s exit from ALEC came just months after the company fought to defeat a draft resolution sponsored by the Heartland Institute — an ExxonMobil grantee from 1998 through 2006 — calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to “reopen and review” its “flawed” conclusion that climate change poses a threat to human health. The EPA’s “endangerment finding” requires the agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions as hazardous pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

After ExxonMobil and the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a utility trade group, objected to the resolution, the Heartland Institute withdrew it and accused the two of being in league with the likes of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.

“Big corporations like ExxonMobil and trade groups like EEI have long been members of the discredited and anti-energy global warming movement,” Heartland’s president, Tim Huelskamp, said in a December 7 press release. “They’ve put their profits and ‘green’ virtue signaling above sound science and the interests of their customers.”

Huelskamp’s ludicrous assertion notwithstanding,some might construe ExxonMobil’s exit from ALEC as a welcome change in direction. The company’s money trail, however, clearly shows that it is still financing climate science denier groups that denigrate any and all climate policy options and provide cover for Congress and the current administration to do nothing. Until ExxonMobil stops funding these groups, its avowed support for a carbon tax, the Paris agreement and other climate initiatives can’t be seen as anything more than a cynical PR ploy.

Posted in: Energy, Global Warming Tags: carbon tax, Climate Denier, Climate Science, ExxonMobil, fossil fuel, Global warming

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Libertarian Pundit John Stossel Defends Price Gouging Victims of Hurricane Florence Tragedy — Here's Why He's Wrong

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https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/**:{2018**/12/10:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:/ny-attorney-general-underwood-exxon-ethics/

Karen Savage

A nonprofit with ties to the fossil fuel industry has filed an ethics complaint against the New York attorney general’s office, alleging that Attorney General Barbara Underwood and two special assistant attorneys general are violating state ethics laws in their climate-related litigation against Exxon.

The Government Justice Center, led by board members who work for organizations that have received funding from oil industry and climate denial groups, alleges that Underwood is “accepting funding from an entity to conduct litigation by New York State on that entity’s behalf.”

The complaint alleges that Matthew Eisenson and Gavin McCabe, two special assistant attorneys general working on the office’s securities fraud case against Exxon as well as other work, are violating state law because they are paid through the NYU School of Law’sState Energy & Environment Impact Center.

Known as the State Impact Center, it wasestablished last year with funding fromBloomberg Philanthropies, a nonprofit founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to support state attorneys general in “defending and promoting clean energy, climate and environmental laws and policies.”

Eisenson and McCabe were both hired by the New York attorney general’s office through the State Impact Center’s fellows program. According to the Center’s website the Center “has offered all state attorneys general the opportunity to hire NYU Law Fellows to work under their direction as special assistant attorney generals on clean energy, climate change, and environmental issues.”

The Government Justice Center contends that Underwood’s office hired Eisenson and McCabe specifically to “help pursue a private party’s political and litigation agenda.” The Center says the use of the NYU fellows program also violates the law by giving the impression that Underwood’s office can be improperly influenced by Bloomberg.

The attorney general’s office said the arrangement violates no ethics laws and has been cleared by the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics.

The Government Justice Center said the alleged violations stem from Eisenson’s and McCabe’s names being included in signature blocks of recent climate change-related litigation, including Underwood’ssuit against Exxon for securities fraud, and a friend-of-the-court brief supporting New York City’s climate liability suit against five major oil companies.

“The presence of the special assistants in those cases, funded by Mr. Bloomberg, raises questions regarding whether Mr. Bloomberg and the Center are unduly influencing decision-making and litigation,” wrote Cameron J. Macdonald, executive director and general counsel for the Government Justice Center, who wrote the complaint.

Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University who studies state attorneys general and their role in national policy making, said it is common for attorneys general to tap into the expertise of various interest groups.

“Overall I don’t see it [the complaint] as a particularly strong argument, in part because this type of arrangement has been very common amongst AGs for quite some time and that includes situations where AGs have worked with private class actionattorneys on a contingency fee basis, which has also raised ethics concerns, but generally speaking, courts across the country have allowed that arrangement to occur,” Nolette said.

“Clearly the [State Impact] Center has an agenda of ‘we want to fight climate change’ but that alone is not particularly unusual or what I would consider unethical,” he said.

“We don’t hide anything that we do,” said Christopher Gray, communications director for the State Impact Center. “We are not securities lawyers, we work on environmental policy. The idea that we’re directly involved in a meaningful way, doesn’t meet the facts.”

“This is another attempt by what appears to be a dark money group to de-legitimize the ExxonMobil investigation, which pre-existed the founding of the State Impact Center and which we don’t have any oversight or influence over,” Gray said.

According to its charity registration statement, the Government Justice Centerwas founded in 2016 to provide “public interest litigation focused on government waste, negligence, misappropriation and other improper actions.”

The organization’s board members include director James Copeland, a senior fellow and director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute. Exxon gave $115,200 to the Manhattan Institute in 2017 for public information and policy research. The group posted a Youtube video in March that was made to look like a real news story titled “The ‘Overheated’ Costs of Climate Change.” It featured former TV newscaster John Stossel, who interviewed senior fellow Oren Cass, who maintains that the costs of the climate crisis are overestimated.

Treasurer for the Government Justice Center is Brandon Muir, who is also the executive director ofReclaim New York, an organizationchairedby Rebekah Mercer.Since at least 2015, the Mercer Family Foundation has fundednumerous organizations known forpromoting climate denial, including the Manhattan Institute and the Heartland Institute.

Tim Hoefer is president of the Government Justice Center and director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, which was aproject of the Manhattan Institute.

Government Justice Center director and retired judge Robert S. Smith, spent more than 25 years aspartner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the firm hired by Exxon to defend itself against a growing number of climate change-related lawsuits, including Underwood’s securities fraud case.

The ethics complaint echoes a report published earlier this year by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which relied on public records requests to allege that attorneys general are involved in a coordinated scheme by private interests to persuade elected officials to hold oil giants responsible for climate change. That alleged conspiracy includes Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who is also investigating Exxon for possible fraud.

“This seems to me to be just one additional part of this massive brawl between the New York attorney general’s office, the Massachusetts attorney general and ExxonMobil. I’m not terribly surprised that they filed this ethics complaint, but it doesn’t strike me as something that’s really going to go anywhere,” Nolette said.

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2013

https://www.alternet.org/media/stossel-classroom-fox-news-libertarian-propaganda-pushed-americas-schools?akid=10105.17805.Zmifip&rd=1&src=newsletter800175&t=4

Two foundations that have been described as "the dark money ATM of the right" have spent more than $1 million combined funding a non-profit organization whose primary function is distributing libertarian education materials featuring Fox Business host John Stossel.

Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, the affiliated funding groups, were until recently obscure entities. But over the past month a series of reports have detailed how those organizations have paid out more than $400 million to over 1,000 conservative groups since their 1999 founding. Those reports have described how the two organizations have allowed wealthy individuals to discreetly underwrite trending conservative causes like climate change denial.

The groups have also been the primary funders behind an effort to flood American classrooms with packaged libertarian lessons branded with John Stossel's mustachioed face. In 2011, Donors Trust gave $540,000 to the Philadelphia-based Center for Independent Thought (CIT), with the funds earmarked for the distribution of "Stossel in the Classroom" teaching materials, according to IRS filings obtained by Mother Jones

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ccording to CIT's website, its mission is to "bring the ideas of liberty to freedom-loving people around the globe." They do so primarily through the distribution of free "Stossel in the Classroom" videos, DVDs and discussion guides, which the program claims are currently used by more than 150,000 teachers in middle school, high school, and college classrooms around the country.

The 2011 Donors Trust donation made up more than two-thirds of CIT's $750,581 revenue, according to IRS filings. The Center spent $360,872 on the "Stossel" program that year, making it by far the largest of the three active programs listed on its website.

"Stossel in the Classroom" began in 1999 when Stossel was still with ABC News. It was seeded with financial support from the libertarian Palmer R. Chitester Fund and grew slowly until CIT took over the program in the mid-2000s.

CIT was a natural home for "Stossel in the Classroom." Founded with Koch money as the Libertarian Review Foundation in the 1970s, real estate developer Howard Rich took control of the organization in 1990 and gave it its current name. Rich is part of the libertarian donor elite,  founded Americans for Limited Government, and sits on the board at Cato, the Club for Growth, and the Friedman Center for Educational Choice. (Rich's wife, Andrea, runs CIT, but does not draw a salary.)

At the same time the group took over "Stossel," new right-wing funding began flowing into its coffers. While Donors Trust was its main sponsor in 2011, it has also received money from Donors Capital Fund ($500,000 from 2007 to 2010) and foundations linked to the Koch brothers.

The purpose of groups like Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund is to allow wealthy benefactors to support conservative causes anonymously. The Tides Foundation is a liberal analogue, donating millions of dollars to left-leaning groups (including Media Matters).  According to Mother Jones, whose non-profit arm has also received Tides funding, "Donors Trust's strategic intent is far narrower and more coherent than Tides'. The groups funded by Donors Trust more or less pursue the same agenda--eliminate regulations, kneecap unions, shrink government, and transfer more power to the private sector."

The Center for Public Integrity produced this graphic detailing the flow of money in recent years from Koch-backed and other right-wing foundations through Donors Trust to a variety of conservative groups:

CIT's funders -- whoever they are -- will find nothing in their program's activities to make them question their investment in helping produce the next generation of libertarians.

The new caretakers built a slick new website, archived more videos spanning Stossel's career, instituted a professional organization of requests and distribution, and began producing specially designed economics DVDs and teaching guides.

Stossel himself provides a brief welcome message from his Fox Business studio in the first segment of 2013's DVD "Good Intentions Gone Wrong," available free on the "Stossel In The Classroom" website.

The program now offers hundreds of free clips from Stossel's shows and specials that claim to seriously address a range of academic subjects, including Art ("Why does Hollywood Hate Capitalism?"), Biology ("Debunking Food Myths"), and History ("The Real Story of Thanksgiving," which explains "how the Pilgrims were hurt by sharing").

"Stossel in the Classroom" also produces libertarian economics courses. The small team of economists that writes materials such as "Making Economics Come Alive with John Stossel" has multiple close ties to the Stavros Center for the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Economic Education at Florida State University.

The videos on the site are stacked with pundits echoing Stossel's radical laissez-faire views. A typical lesson pairs videos of Fox Business pundits tearing into a regulatory effort -- a video on the 2011 health care law features serial liar Betsy McCaughey and industrial-fan entrepreneur Bob Luddy -- with teacher's guides that ask if government regulation is necessary.

Students who answer "Yes" are unlikely to win many of the 225 cash prizes totaling $23,000 distributed annually in the "Stossel in the Classroom" essay contest. Last year's competition, entitled, "Politicians' Promises Gone Wrong," asked students to write an essay of between 500 and 1,000 words about the government's ability to deliver on its promises. Students could take either side, but the rules stipulated that the essays must reference or cite an example in Stossel's latest anti-government tract, No They Can't: Why Government Fails -- But Individuals Succeed, or his associated TV special.

Last year's winners, who received all-expenses-paid trips to New York and appeared on Stossel's show, were both home school students. The winning entry, by a 13-year-old student, used the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 as an example of harmful government overreach, and in support of her case cited a Heritage Foundation analyst who suggested that as a result of the law employers would simply hire fewer women and minorities -- thus hurting both groups. Second place honors went to an essay that built its critique of government social spending around the metaphor of a class president candidate promising free candy to the student body. "While the students may enjoy the sugar and the candidate may have won the election," wrote the 15-year-old author, "the candy may give them cavities at the expense of the taxpayer."

It is unclear whether John Stossel is being paid for his role as the face of "Stossel in the Classroom." CIT did not return calls regarding $230,000 in expenses for the program categorized on its tax returns as "Other." Fox Business and Stossel himself likewise did not respond to requests for comment.

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smoking gun overview ebell

http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-trump-ally-myron-ebell-spread-misinformation-big-tobacco-and-big-oil

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    omg primary on educationevil pendingJohn Stossel pseudo- investigative reporter?  parallels to penn & teller?ABC any connection to entine? Prime Time catch a predator BS?  =ironic given robt downey?--- ==Stossel: Lung cancer and meJohn Stossel By John Stossel  Published April 27, 2016  FoxNews.com (FBN)Last week’s column on my lung surgery struck a nerve. Many of you wished me well. Others said I deserve to die.  “He likes free markets?” sneered one Internet commenter. “In a truly free market, society wouldn’t subsidize the cost of his smoking. In a truly free market, he’d be dead.” No, I wouldn’t be dead. In a real free market, I would pay for my own care and that Also, I’ve never smoked cigarettes. Some people who don’t smoke get lung cancer too. The angriest comments were in the Washington Post: “Stossel should ask for his money back and the doctors should put cancer back into his lungs. That's what happens in a consumer-driven market, right?” I am grateful for my hospital's lifesaving technology and the skills of some of my caregivers. But it would be better if hospitals were as efficient as FedEx and most of what's offered by the private sector. People can get very unhinged when libertarians argue that markets work better. “HOW would that work? WHO would pay the nurses and the staff that keep a hospital running?” Who do they think pays now? Government and insurance companies paying doesn’t make care “free.” Government has no money of its own; it takes it from us. Such third-party payments just hide the cost.  “Is John Stossel’s life worth more than the guy who collects my trash? … (T)urn healthcare over to his jackboot crew, only the rich will live to old age.”But it’s the shopping around -- including shopping by the rich -- that fuels the innovation and discounting that extends everyone’s lives, not just the rich. Charity will help the very poor.[Lung Cancer Overview | HealthGrove] “Let’s see him negotiate the price of chemo vs surgery when he’s in the ambulance on way to hospital … Medical care is not amenable to usual market forces.”But it is. Patients wouldn’t need to negotiate from the ambulance because such decisions would have already been made for them by thousands of previous patients, especially the 2 percent who pay closest attention. Word would get around that hospital X is a rip-off but hospital Y gives better treatment for less. Doctors would advertise prices. Rating agencies would evaluate them for quality. Everyone will know more. A hospital worker complained about this “customer mentality. A hospital is NOT a restaurant. It is not Burger King. You don’t get to have it your way.” Why not? Must we just passively take what we’re handed when it comes to medicine, even though we’d never accept that with hamburgers? Medical patients tolerate indifferent service the way people tolerate waiting at the post office. The Postal Service, we were told, can’t possibly make a profit, get it there overnight, etc. Then came UPS and FedEx. Competition showed what is possible. “Stossel may think he’s getting ‘excellent medical care’,” writes Cato Institute health care analyst Michael Cannon.“But he doesn’t know it, and neither do his doctors, because there is no market system to show how much better it could be … In a market system, competition would push providers to strive to keep patients from falling through these cracks … In our system, there is no such pressure on providers … because the real customer is government. As a result, few patients know how unsafe American medicine is.”Cannon warns, “Without that information, patients -- even when they are smart, skeptical and wealthy like Stossel -- are constantly consenting to inferior care.”A few extra-savvy consumers might be aware that my hospital got a “B” rating on Leapfrog Group’s Hospital Safety Score, and, says Cannon, it rates New York-Presbyterian “below average” in nine categories, including collapsed lungs and surgical site infections. “Did Stossel know about these safety measures before he chose New York-Presbyterian?”  No, I didn’t.I am grateful for my hospital’s lifesaving technology and the skills of some of my caregivers. But it would be better if hospitals were as efficient as FedEx and most of what’s offered by the private sector.My local supermarket is open 24/7. They rarely make me wait, prices are low, there’s plenty of choice and they rarely poison me.That’s what competition brings -- if people pay with their own money.John Stossel is the host of "Stossel" (Fridays at 9 PM/ET), a weekly program highlighting current consumer issues with a libertarian viewpoint. Stossel also appears regularly on Fox News Channel (FNC) providing signature analysis. Click here for more information on John Stossel.http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelcannon/2016/04/22/john-stossel-is-battling-cancer-look-whos-making-it-harder/#1cd3a9185854grnpeacehttp://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/climate-deniers/front-groups/center-for-independent-thought-stossel-in-the-classroom/$155,000 received from Koch foundations 2005-2013 [Total Koch foundation grants 1997-2013: $155,000]The Center for Independent Thought (CIT) owns and operates Stossel in the Classroom, the teaching series for middle and high school teachers based on the punditry of John Stossel, a FOX Business host who consistently denies the scientific evidence of global warming. CIT also serves as a pass-through organization for grants to Koch-affiliated organizations, according to CIT’s tax filings. The 2009 edition of ABC News’ Stossel in the Classroom featured a segment explicitly telling students there is still debate “about whether or not human activity is the cause” of climate change (14 years prior to the Stossel lesson, even ‘conservative’ scientific authorities like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change considered climate change proven beyond reasonable doubt by 1995).The Stossel in the Classroom segment included numerous debunked arguments, such as atmospheric CO2 changes lag behind temperature changes or that global warming is caused by the Sun. Stossel featured several scientists with direct or indirect ties to fossil fuel companies and front groups, including John Christy, Tim Ball and Roy Spencer, who famously labeled those who recognize climate science to be “Global Warming Nazi’s.” Stossel mocks the notion of a “denial machine,” or a network of groups and people paid by fossil fuel interests to create doubt over climate science.Teachers using the Stossel lesson plan were encouraged to ask questions such as, “If there is overwhelming evidence that global warming is a trend that will worsen and that we are causing it, why are people such as John Stossel questioning it?” The Stossel lesson plan encourages students to discuss quotes from people like Fred L Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and instructs students to use the Internet to find the “Oregon Petition,” a misleading petition co-published by the Exxon-funded George C. Marshall Institute.Complimenting its misleading portrayal of climate science, Stossel in the Classroom has promoted fossil fuel use. The program hosted  energy industry consultant Alex Epstein, who is paid by energy companies to claim that “fossil fuels improve the planet,” gave a platform for author Jason Mattera that hollywood celebrities promote the “scam” of climate science, and hosted a discussion on “energy independence” with pundits from fossil-fuel funded think tanks (Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute and Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute).Through its funding and management, CIT and John Stossel are woven into Charles Koch’s political influence network. CIT past and present board members include longtime friends and fellow donors within the Koch network, such as Wisconsin Club for Growth director  Eric O’Keefe, and Cato Institute executive David Boaz, and New Year real estate mogel Howie Rich, married to CIT president Andrea Rich.Even the content of Stossel in the Classroom is a direct product of Koch political institutions. According to Counterpunch, professors in the Koch-funded economics department at George Mason University, as well as the Koch-controlled organizations hosted by GMU–the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies–are involved in creating material for Stossel and staffing his program.Organizations founded and controlled by Charles Koch work closely with John Stossel, including the Cato Institute and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. These organizations provide material and pundits that promote anti-regulatory, pro-corporate policies that mirror Koch’s preferences. CIT acts as a pass-through for grants to the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. CIT itself increasingly hides its own funding through dark money funnels like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, according to Media Matters.John Stossel himself has participated in conferences put on by top climate denial organizations, such asThe Heartland Institute and Americans for Prosperity.OMG challenger crypto hedge find?Stossel in the Classroom 1420 Walnut Street, Suite 1011 Philadelphia , PA 19102 Check to: Center for Independent Thought, Inc. To support the Center for Independent Thought's media project "Stossel in the Classroom." Using educational and engaging segments from John Stossel of Fox News, the project provides teachers with thought-provoking programs that stimulate lively classroom discussions on such subjects as free market economics, foreign aid, price gouging, andschool choice. Students are motivated to question conventional wisdom, gather and analyze information, and distinguish between fact and opinion. Total $25,0002007 stosselABC's Stossel Takes on Gore Movie, Talks to Dissenting ScientistsBy Brad Wilmouth | October 20, 2007 | 1:26 PM EDT On Friday's "20/20," ABC's John Stossel presented the views of scientists who dissent from the Al Gore view of global warming, including two former members of the IPCC – the committee which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Gore. These scientists disagreed with the selection process of the committee's members and some of its conclusions. The ABC host disputed some of the claims in "An Inconvenient Truth," and even presented the view that increased carbon dioxide levels are the result of global warming, rather than the cause, as he took on Gore's famous graph from the movie. Stossel: "But the real inconvenient truth is that carbon increases came after temperature rose -- usually hundreds of years later. Temperature went up first. I wanted to ask Mr. Gore about that and other things, but he wouldn't agree to talk about this." Video of the segment can be seen here. (Transcript follows) The ABC host introduced his regular "Give Me a Break" segment: "You've heard the reports. The globe is warming. And it's our fault. And the consequences will be terrible. But you should know there is another side to this story. And scientists who've tried to tell it are often threatened. Which makes me say, 'Give Me a Break.'" Then came a number of clips of journalists relaying the purported danger of global warming, and clips of children expressing their fears of the future. After arguing that "An Inconvenient Truth" was incorrect or misleading in the way it presented the dangers of rising sea levels and the plight of polar bears in the Arctic, the ABC host then got to the movie's famous graph that the former Vice President used to argue that higher carbon dioxide levels cause temperatures to increase. Stossel: "I knew that carbon dioxide's thought to amplify temperature increases, but this shows a clear cause an effect. For 600,000 years, when carbon rose, so did temperature. It suggests that carbon levels control temperature. But the real inconvenient truth is that carbon increases came after temperature rose -- usually hundreds of years later. Temperature went up first. I wanted to ask Mr. Gore about that and other things, but he wouldn't agree to talk about this."Stossel presented several scientists who dispute contentions by Gore and others that "the debate is over" on global warming. These scientists included Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, Tim Ball of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, and John Christy and Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama. Stossel relayed their contentions that global warming and cooling trends have happened in the past, and related that the media had "fretted about that then, too." Stossel: "Climate changes, they point out. It always has -- with or without man. Early last century, even without today's big output of carbon dioxide, the Arctic went through a warm period. The media fretted about that then, too. And Greenland's temperatures rose 50 percent faster in the 1920s than they're rising now. Some scientists say the warming may be caused by changes in the sun or ocean currents or changes in cloud cover. Or other things we don't understand. The debate is not over." More on the media's history of reporting on warming and cooling trends over the last century can be found in a May 2005 report by the MRC's Business and Media Institute. Reiter and Christy had notably been members of the IPCC, and they were critical of the way governments chose the members of the committee, some of whom were merely activists instead of scientists, suggesting that politics had played too great a role. STOSSEL: Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute and John Christy say they were members of the IPCC. That so-called group of scientists, they say, is not what people think it is. REITER: The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is governments who nominate people. You'll find in many chapters that there are people who are not scientists at all. STOSSEL: Who are they? REITER: They were essentially activists. STOSSEL: Members of groups like Greenpeace were involved. And when the IPCC report came out, not all its members agreed with what was said. Reiter further said that he had resigned from the committee in protest because he disagreed with some of the report's findings, and had to threaten a lawsuit against the IPCC to have his name removed from the report, although, according to Stossel, the IPCC disputes this account.Stossel then dealt with the issue of these types of global warming dissenters being "smeared as deniers," as those who support the more liberal view of global warming seek to compare their way of thinking to that of Holocaust deniers. STOSSEL: Today, scientists like these are often smeared as "deniers." UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We have Holocaust deniers, we have climate change deniers. And to be honest, I don't think there's a great deal of difference. LINDA DOUGLAS, ABC News: Deniers are confusing the issue and delaying solutions. Last August, "Newsweek" ran a cover story attacking the global warming "denial machine," and the "NBC Nightly News" soon ran its own story with the same theme. After recounting that many global warming activists, like Al Gore and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., try to discredit skeptics by accusing them of "being purchased by a 'well-funded denial machine,'"  these scientists were shown denying that they receive any money because of their views, as they contended that, rather than being rewarded for their views, they have faced harassment and threats. Stossel summed up his report: "Is this what the global warming debate has come to? One side saying, 'Shut up, dissent must not be heard'? The truth is that, while everyone agrees the earth has warmed, lots of good scientists don't agree that it's mostly our fault, and don't agree that it's going to be a catastrophe." Below is a complete transcript of Stossel's "Give Me a Break" segment from the Friday October 19 "20/20": JOHN STOSSEL: You've heard the reports. The globe is warming. And it's our fault. And the consequences will be terrible. But you should know there is another side to this story. And scientists who've tried to tell it are often threatened. Which makes me say, "Give Me a Break." MATT LAUER, Today Show: -the world is heating up fast, and we have ourselves to blame. DAWNA FRIESEN, Today Show: -global warming is real, and we humans are almost certainly the cause. STOSSEL: Books warn that the earth is under fire, a suicidal planet's approaching a boiling point and a toxic burn. Children are frightened. UNIDENTIFIED GIRL #1: I worry. My mom worries. UNIDENTIFIED GIRL #2: The water might rise, and it might flood the whole town. UNIDENTIFIED BOY #1: We won't be able to survive for long. STOSSEL: And people say since global warming is because of man, it must be fixed by man now. UNIDENTIFIED MAN in ad, standing in front of a moving train: Some say irreversible consequences are 30 years away. STOSSEL: This Ad Council PSA says ignoring the coming crisis is like putting our kids in front of a train. MAN: That won't affect me. [The man steps off the track and leaves his daughter in front of the moving train.] STOSSEL: What do you most worry will happen? UNIDENTIFIED BOY #2: We'll all die. STOSSEL: Are there some people who say this isn't true? [Several children who are gathered say, "Yes."] STOSSEL: Might they be right? [Nearly all the children gathered say, "No."] STOSSEL: How do you know they're not right? UNIDENTIFIED GIRL #3: Well, because the Earth is getting hotter. STOSSEL: Where do you learn this? UNIDENTIFIED BOY #1: I saw the Al Gore video. JERRY SEINFELD, at the Academy Awards: And the Oscar goes to An Inconvenient Truth. STOSSEL: The global warming documentary featuring Vice President Al Gore has been seen by millions. People have proclaimed him a prophet, a cultural icon, a conquering hero. LEONARDO DICAPRIO: You are a true champion for the cause, Mr. Gore. STOSSEL: And last week, he won a Nobel Peace Prize. The Oscars were followed by other worldwide media events. GORE: You are Live Earth. STOSSEL: With all this hoopla, it's no surprise that 86 percent of Americans say global warming is a serious problem. JOHN EDWARDS: Global warming is now, by anybody's measure, a crisis. STOSSEL: But is it a crisis? Yes, the globe is warming, but is it really all our fault? And is it true that the debate is over? No. What you think you know, may not be so. For example, in An Inconvenient Truth, Gore says if we allow the globe to warm, terrible things will happen. And: AL GORE: Sea level worldwide would go up 20 feet. UNIDENTIFIED BOY #3: Yeah, maybe like the height of this building. UNIDENTIFIED GIRL #4: We'll probably just, like, drown, and we'll die. GORE: This is what would happen to the sea level in Florida. This is what would happen to San Francisco Bay. STOSSEL: Maybe. Maybe in thousands of years, says the IPCC, the group that shared last week's Nobel Prize with the Vice President. But in 100 years, the oceans might rise 7 to 24 inches, not 20 feet. GORE: A faster buildup of heat here. STOSSEL: Mr. Gore also talks about melting ice caps. GORE: That's not good for creatures like polar bears- STOSSEL: They show this heart-rending cartoon. [Cartoon of a polar bear swimming to floating ice and trying to get on, but it breaks leaving the bear in the water.] GORE: A new scientific study shows that for the first time, they're finding polar bears that have actually drowned. STOSSEL: But I bet you didn't know that polar bears appear to be doing all right. Future warming may hurt them, but right now, the World Conservation Union and the U.S. Geological Survey say most populations of polar bears are stable or increasing. GORE: There is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others- STOSSEL: The most impressive demonstration in Mr. Gore's movie is the big graph of carbon dioxide levels. GORE: Here's what the temperature has been on our Earth. Now, one thing that kind of jumps out at you is: Did they ever fit together? STOSSEL: My goodness! I knew that carbon dioxide's thought to amplify temperature increases, but this shows a clear cause and effect. For 600,000 years, when carbon rose, so did temperature. It suggests that carbon levels control temperature. But the real inconvenient truth is that carbon increases came after temperature rose -- usually hundreds of years later. Temperature went up first. I wanted to ask Mr. Gore about that and other things, but he wouldn't agree to talk about this. Why should he when he and others say- GORE: The debate's over. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The science is agreed upon. Governor ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER (R-CA): The debate is over, and the science is in. PAUL REITER, Pasteur Institute: It's absurd for people to say that sort of thing. It's really wrong. STOSSEL: These scientists are among those who say the debate is by no means over. John Christie and Roy Spencer won NASA's Medal for Exceptional Achievement for figuring out how to get temperature data from satellites. They agree that the Earth has warmed. JOHN CHRISTY, University of Alabama: We all agree that it's warmed, I think. The big question is, and the thing that we dispute, is: Is it because of mankind? STOSSEL: Climate changes, they point out. It always has -- with or without man. Early last century, even without today's big output of carbon dioxide, the Arctic went through a warm period. The media fretted about that then, too. And Greenland's temperatures rose 50 percent faster in the 1920s than they're rising now. Some scientists say the warming may be caused by changes in the sun or ocean currents or changes in cloud cover. Or other things we don't understand. The debate is not over. And, anyway, who's to say that yesterday's temperature was the perfect one. If temperatures keep rising now, these scientists say we don't know that that will be all bad. TIM BALL, Natural Resources Stewardship Project: The fact is, when the climate changes, there are gains and there are losses. STOSSEL: But Tim Ball, who studies the history of climate change, points out that all we hear about is the bad news from the IPCC, that massive group of global warming scientists. RICHARD BRANSON: 2,000 scientists. LESTER HOLT, NBC News: 2,000 scientists. FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN: 2,500 scientists say the globe is getting warmer and we are to blame. REITER: There's the most unmitigated rubbish talked about- STOSSEL: Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute and John Christy say they were members of the IPCC. That so-called group of scientists, they say, is not what people think it is. REITER: The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is governments who nominate people. You'll find in many chapters that there are people who are not scientists at all. STOSSEL: Who are they? REITER: They were essentially activists. STOSSEL: Members of groups like Greenpeace were involved. And when the IPCC report came out, not all its members agreed with what was said. ROY SPENCER, University of Alabama: We were not asked to look at a particular statement and sign our names to it at all. REITER: I got very frustrated, and I resigned. STOSSEL: But the IPCC still listed Reiter as part of the so-called consensus. REITER: I contacted the IPCC and said, "Look, I've resigned. I don't want to have anything more to do with this." And they said, "Well, you've been involved, so you're still on the list." STOSSEL: Only when he threatened to sue, he says, did they take his name off the report. The IPCC denies that that happened. Today, scientists like these are often smeared as deniers. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We have Holocaust deniers, we have climate change deniers. And to be honest, I don't think there's a great deal of difference. LINDA DOUGLAS, ABC News: Deniers are confusing the issue and delaying solutions. STOSSEL: Often they're accused of being purchased by a "well-funded denial machine." ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: These corporate toadies lying to you and telling you that global warming doesn't exist. GORE: The illusion of a debate has been purchased with millions of dollars a year- STOSSEL: Aren't you guys all on the take? BALL: I wish I was. I wouldn't be driving a 1992 car and living in a leaky apartment. STOSSEL: These scientists all say they don't get any money from business, yet some have been threatened. One email said, "You will not live long enough to see global warming." BALL: And even more direct than that. REITER: We stick our necks out. We do get hurt. STOSSEL: Is this what the global warming debate has come to? One side saying, "Shut up, dissent must not be heard." The truth is that, while everyone agrees the earth has warmed, lots of good scientists don't agree that it's mostly our fault, and don't agree that it's going to be a catastrophe. So when the Nobel Prize winner says- GORE: The debate's over. The debate's over. STOSSEL: I say, "Give Me a Break."tags:EnvironmentGlobal WarmingWeatherABC20/20An Inconvenient Truthhttp://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/brad-wilmouth/2007/10/20/abcs-stossel-takes-gore-movie-talks-dissenting-scientistsFox News: John Stossel supporting e-cigarettes | E-Cigarette Forumwww.e-cigarette-forum.com › ... › Media and General News                                            Fox News e-cig study goes up in smokeJan 24, 2015E-cigarettes: Some say vaping e-cigarettes is worse than smoking ...May 30, 2013Great Article by John StosselNov 17, 2011E cigs on Stossel showJan 28, 2011More results from www.e-cigarette-forum.comThe FDA Kills Smokers - Reason.comreason.com/archives/2011/11/17/the-fda-kills-smokers ReasonNov 17, 2011 - Banning e-cigarettes won't save lives. ... like cigarettes, but instead of burning tobacco, they vaporize liquid nicotine when users puff on, or "vape," them. ... To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com.Fox News: John Stossel Supporting E-Cigarettes - Vaping In The ...www.vaportalk.com › ... › Vaping In The News == BRO: Thomas S. Allems, M.D., M.P.H.San Francisco, Calif. MMM>Features>Headliner: Harvard Medical School's Tom StosselMATTHEW ARNOLDAUGUST 14, 2009FEATURESHeadliner: Harvard Medical School's Tom StosselShare this article:facebooktwitterlinkedingoogleDownload: Headlinerv2_sept09.pdf Tom Stossel, MD, the Harvard Medical School professor who took a brave and lonely stand for the value of industry-sponsored CME before a hostile Senate committee in July, seems an unlikely activist. Heck, Stossel laughs, an unlikely doctor. “I scored with the control gerbils on my math MCATS,” says Stossel, “but I figured out how to do the clinical part well, and I probably would have gone into practice if it hadn't been for the Vietnam War. Somehow, instead of an Army hospital, he ended up at the NIH, where he launched pioneering research into cell crawling before moving to Harvard, where he practices and teaches hematology. He also moonlighted as a diplomatic diagnostician. In 1976, the State Department shipped him to Moscow to study blood anomalies in embassy staff (he found that the cause was microbial, not radiation, as was feared, and that Soviet life was indeed miserable and oppressive). He was also tapped to treat Algerian leader Houari Boumedienne for a mysterious blood disorder. In 1987, he joined the scientific advisory board of Biogen, which allowed him to apply some of his research insights. It also gave him a window onto industry ethics. “These business people were really honest compared to some of my academic colleagues, who'd run their grandmothers over,” he says. “About this time, this outpouring of anti-industry activism began to impose barriers between researcher-industry collaboration, and I got obsessed with it.” Stossel's clinical practice has deepened his appreciation of industry contributions to care. “Medicine is so incomparably better than when I started, ” says Stossel, “not because it's better regulated but because of the incredible tools they've gotten from industry.” He began writing op-ed pieces, but says for a few years, “I thought that I was mostly talking to myself.” He was recently recruited by the free markets-boosting Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow, and in July, he helped found the Association of Clinical Researchers and Educators (ACRE), which bills itself as “an organization of medical professionals dedicated to the advancement of patient care through productive collaboration with industry and its counterparts.” “Finally, people are beginning to have skin in the game, and they realize where all this regulation is going,” says Stossel. ACRE's debut conference, held in Boston on July 23, was standing room only, says Stossel. It focused on product-based speaking bans and the new Massachusetts law on industry-physician contact. A week later, Stossel gamely defended industry-physician collaboration before a Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing titled “Medical Research and Education: Higher Learning or Higher Earning.” “Sen. Kohl, who's been very critical of the industry, seemed to get that we shouldn't be throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” he says hopefully. Some of the blame for the industry's bad rap belongs to pharma companies, says Stossel. “They've been wimpy with the pharmascolds,” a term he co-coined for industry critics. “If you don't vigorously rebut them, people think you must have something to hide.” Stossel's the centrist of his accomplished clan—not a “card-carrying libertarian” like his brother John, host of ABC's 20/20. Stossel's wife, Kerry, just left Tom's of Maine after a long stint leading professional advocacy. Their two kids, Sage and Scott, work for The Atlantic Monthly. He and Kerry travel to Zambia several times a year to deliver medical and dental care to residents of a remote chiefdom. “I've done 10,000 fluoride treatments on kids,” says Stossel, who has also worked on addressing sickle cell anemia there. “It takes my mind off of conflict of interest.” ----food fight tv show Caroline Clausen...Herself - Second Place Essay Winner Pierre Desrochers...Himself Jon Entine...Himself - Center for Health and Risk Communication Michael Hanson...Himself - Consumer Reports Senior Scientist legithttp://consumersunion.org/experts/michael-hansen/ Whitney Lauritsen...Herself Baylen Linnekin...Himself - Founder, Keep Food Legal Madeline Peltzer...Herself - First Place Essay Winner Nina Teichelz...Herself Robb Wolf...Himself ---The Pro-Industry ProfessorProfessor Thomas P. Stossel defends pharmaceutical companiesBy LAURA G. MIRVISS, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER April 24, 20091For the first third of his medical career, Thomas P. Stossel says he was your “typical academic socialist”—buried in research and clinical work. He won recognition for discovering the sixth most common protein in the blood in 1979 and has spent 30 years trying to unravel its function. But outside his speciality of hematology, Stossel—who heads the Translational Medicine Division at Harvard affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital—is known for something far more controversial than the protein “filamin A.” Amid a wave of new regulations regarding physician-industry ties, Stossel has stood largely alone as a vocal and vehement opponent of new oversight at the Medical School, where he says administrators have blindly accepted new rules to quiet recent controversies over such relationships. Concerns about industry ties—which have gathered steam nationwide in recent years—erupted at the Medical School last fall after students protested what they alleged were undisclosed and unethical conflicts of interest in their classes, drawing national media attention. But Stossel says the media coverage, which helped prompt new policies at some of Harvard’s largest affiliated hospitals, was off base and ignored the positive contributions of industry—and he hasn’t kept those opinions to himself. He argues that the current activism is not supported by the data—citing a small survey reporting that 80 percent of patients do not care if their physicians have pharmaceutical companies ties—and that maligning industry investment will only inhibit scientific progress. But those stances have drawn fire from many of Stossel’s colleagues, who say academic medicine has long suffered from ethical breeches because ties to industry have gone unregulated, and that Stossel’s statements ignore the potential for bias introduced by industry involvement. “Rather than take on our central premise, he says how indispensable industry is to churning out new products,” says David J. Rothman, who directs the center for the Study of Science and Medicine at Columbia University. “What we are saying is that you need to make sure there are firewalls between industry and medicine.” But Stossel says that in the rush to quell protest at Harvard Medical School, the interests of physicians and industry have been brushed aside—preventing open debate and key stakeholders from having any say in the policies. Now, with new regulations at some Harvard hospitals and a Massachusetts state law going into effect this July that ban gifts and requires public disclosure of all industry funding over $50, Stossel says he hopes there will be a backlash from affected physicians. “Now there’s some skin in the game,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to politely suggest some things that might be changed.” ‘PHARMASCOLDS’ Stossel says he first learned about industry’s impact on the medical profession after joining the advisory board of Biogen Idec Inc., a Cambridge biotechnology company. Despite their contribution to science, Stossel says his colleagues’ practices at Biogen would have violated current conflict of interest codes today. About the time he joined Biogen’s board, there was an incident at the Harvard affiliated Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary that he says precipitated the movement to combat conflict of interest in medicine. Stossel says he was disturbed by the portrayal of the event, and that reality was being hijacked—so he decided to start educating himself about the issues. “For 20 years, I just read all the books, and fumed and fussed,” he says. He says that after the Los Angeles Times blasted some of his colleagues, and the National Institutes of Health imposed a blanket ban on consulting, he decided to come out and write his first op-ed defending industry’s role in medicine. And as his own hospital has put in place more stringent regulations, he has continued his advocacy, fascinated, he says, by the “quasi-religious” coterie of advocates who catapulted conflict of interest issues into the spotlight. But he adds that those in favor of regulation retain the upper-hand because the path of least resistance for academic leadership is to try to curb dissent—which he says explains the changes at Harvard’s affiliates. “If there is a big ruckus going on, and the students are running amuck, and the media is hyping it up, and Senator Grassley is nosing around, all you care about is quieting this down,“ he says And he said that he never hears from the “pharmascolds,” despite frequently criticizing them in public, who he says prefer to present the issue as if there is no dissent. “I’m not a total nutcase,” he says. “I’m not saying that the world is flat or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS—I think I have data and logic—it’s contrarian logic, but it’s logic.” ‘DEMONIZING INDUSTRY’ While his opponents certainly agree Stossel’s arguments are contrarian, not all consider them grounded in logic.Rothman, the Columbia professor, says that Stossel is the master of the “straw man” argument, constructing the rationale for conflict of interest regulations to aid his position.“He makes it out like we are demonizing industry,” Rothman says.Rothman says that Stossel bases his attacks on the movement on a misinterpretation that its supporters seek the abolishment of pharmaceutical and drug device relationships in medicine—a charge he called absurd. “What we want is careful regulation of marking activities in industry,” he says. “We don’t want to put industry out of business, but we want to make sure their marketing activities are not conflated with their educational activities.” In particular, he says that professional medical societies giving out bags and pens with drug companies names is a particularly egregious practice that merits heavy regulation. “We don’t think that doctors should be walking advertisements for industry,” he says. Though Stossel says biased medicine is in no one’s best interest, he disagrees with using regulation to prevent it, arguing that physicians should be free to determine on their own if the gift is a bribe. But on physicians ghostwriting pharmaceutical studies—another contentious ethical issue—Stossel is not nearly so far from the medical mainstream, saying that honorary authorship, in which doctors simply sign their name to a document written by industry employees, is wrong. But Stossel says such incidents are rare. And in keeping with his contrarian positions, Stossel says he has few qualms about less extreme forms of ghostwriting, in which big pharmaceutical companies hire professionals to write a draft of the findings from multi-million dollar clinical studies. Harlan M. Krumholz, a professor of cardiology and public health at Yale, who has written extensively on ghostwriting, says that the degree to which he has seen ghostwriting and other distortion tactics used constitutes a major problem for medicine. He adds that arguments like Stossel’s miss the purpose of conflict of interest regulation by perpetuating a false perception that physicians are either for or against pharmaceutical companies. Krumholz says the debate is not about whether industry should be involved in medicine at all, but rather what interactions are ethical, a question the profession must answer if it is to retain patients’ confidence. “We have case after case of problems,” he says. “We need to restore trust and be transparent about these relationships.” As Medical School Dean Jeffrey S. Flier revisits Harvard policy, Stossel says, it is important to not overdo regulation to appease protesters. He says he would like the rules to be like the constitution: simple. “Let’s get data, lets be flexible,” he says. “If people do bad things, shoot them. The rules we have now are as if you couldn’t have a car that ever exceeds the speed limit.” Stossel adds he is not holding his breath for policy he finds acceptable, but he feels that the Dean is trying to be reasonable. “I hope the message will get across that has to be done in a different way,” he says. “You will never please the critics.... You cannot please everybody and cure cancer.” —Staff writer Laura G. Mirviss can be reached at lmirviss@fas.harvard.edu. For recent research, faculty profiles, and a look at the issues facing Harvard scientists, check out The Crimson's science page. =3. Fire DepartmentsLibertarian John Stossel (a host on the Fox Business Channel and writer for FoxNews.com) has long been a proponent of privatizing fire departments, which he believes would lower Americans’ tax burden and make them safer. As Stossel sees it, privatization would make firefighting more efficient. But the subscription-based privatized firefighting model can have disastrous results.In 1996, the village of Rye Brook, NY (which is about 30 miles from Manhattan) made the mistake of hiring the Rural/Metro Fire Department (a private company) to fight fires—prior to that, firefighter protection in Rye Brook was handled by the fire department of nearby Port Chester, NY. But Rye Brook returned to public-sector firefighting only two years later after a $1 million home was destroyed by fire—perhaps avoidably. Salvatore M. Cresenzi, Rye Brook’s mayor at the time, acknowledged that Rye Brook’s deal with Rural/Metro “was not a success [7]”—and public-sector firefighters’ unions asserted that the home could have been saved had Rural/Metro operated more efficiently in Rye Brook.Seventeen years later in August 2013, there was another horror story involving Rural/Metro—this time in Surprise, Arizona (a Phoenix suburb), where Justin and Kasia Purcell lived in a mobile home. Two weeks after their home burned to the ground, the Purcells received a bill for $19,825 from Rural/Metro because they had not paid the annual subscription Rural/Metro charges for firefighter service in Surprise. But the Purcells told the Huffington Post they had no idea such a service existed [8] and that they would have gladly paid the annual fee had they known.The Purcells’ nightmare is a classic example of why the public is much better served by an “all for one/one for all” approach to firefighting: people pay taxes, and firefighting is among the things those taxes cover. Period. And there are no outrageous bills for $19,825 when your home burns to the ground.  altner 5/14=http://www.desmogblog.com/tags/john-stosselFox News host John Stossel says that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has passed its prime, and is no longer useful. After the Obama Administration last week overruled the EPA’s smog regulations, Stossel took to the airwaves on the Fox Business Channel to tell us that the EPA is no longer a worthwhile organization. Stossel told us: “Thank goodness for the EPA…The air and water are cleaner than they use to be. But they passed those rules. It’s diminishing returns. They have done a wonderful job, stop already. Stick a fork in it, it’s done.”  2007:No, Stossel shouldn't be embarrassed, he's well past that point. ABC News should be though, over Stossel's climate change denial piece set to air tonight. Stossel writes:But is it a crisis? The globe is warming, but is it really all our fault? And is it true the debate is over? No. What you think you know may not be so."Seriously, I honestly thought we were moving on, but I guess there's still a few media left with their heads planted firmly in the sand. Even the "experts" Stossel uses for his piece are the same handful of deniers that anyone looking to shock and provoke are prone to air. Here's background information in Stossel's tired line-up:Roy "Interfaith Science Advisor" Spencer John "just use air conditioning" Christy"Infectious" Paul ReiterTim "energy lobby" Ball Here's a challenge, Stossel, ask any of your "experts" to produce their peer-reviewed research disproving in any way the theory of human-induced climate change.   ===http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_StosselJohn Stossel - formerly co-anchor of ABC's 20/20 and host of ABC's John Stossel Specials reports for ABC radio and ABCNews.com [1] - is moving to the Fox Business Network to host a weekly prime-time program and will appear on the Fox News Channel[2]. Contents  [hide] 1 Personal life2 Moving with the Times3 Worried in America 3.1 Book4 Articles and resources 4.1 Related SourceWatch articles4.2 References4.3 External resources4.4 External articles Personal lifeStossel's older brother is Dr. Thomas P. Stossel[3] of the Manhattan Institute[4] and American Council on Science and Health.[5]Moving with the TimesIn September 1996 Stossel gave a speech to the Federalist Society in Washington, D.C. Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman reported that when it came to the question and answer session Stossel was asked: "If you believe that consumer reporting works, and is a better regulator than regulation or lawsuits, why did you stop doing it?""I got sick of it," Stossel responded. "I also now make so much money I just lost interest in saving a buck on a can of peas. Twenty years was enough. But mainly, I came to realize that the government was doing far more harm to people than business and I ought to be reporting on that. Nobody else was."In January 2004 Stossel's book - Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media - was published. "In Give Me a Break, Stossel explains how ambitious bureaucrats, intellectually lazy reporters, and greedy lawyers make your life worse even as they claim to protect your interests. Taking on such sacred cows as the FDA, the War on Drugs, and scaremongering environmental activists -- and backing up his trademark irreverence with careful reasoning and research -- he shows how the problems that government tries and fails to fix can be solved better by the extraordinary power of the free market," the promotional material proclaims. [6]Writing in LA Weekly, Greg Goldin, cited Stossel's 1996 comments in a story on a launch party for the book, noting in passing that "Stossel, sipping a vodka tonic, seemed a lot more hedonistic than his admirers". [7]Subsequently Stossel penned a letter to the editor of LA Weekly challenging that he had been drinking a vodka tonic and that he had made the comments: "The alleged source of that quote was a 1996 speech I gave to the Federalist Society in which I supposedly said that I stopped consumer reporting because 'I got sick of it. … I also now make so much money, I just lost interest in saving a buck on a can of peas.' That doesn't sound like anything I've said and certainly doesn't reflect the reasons I shifted my focus from consumer reporting to government programs and lawyers (I shifted because I concluded they do more harm to consumers than business). The transcript of this speech that the Federalist Society supplied does not include the quote." <[8]In ^an ^April ^2004 ^column, ^Russell ^Mokhiber ^and ^Robert ^Weissman ^reported ^that ^they ^had ^both ^a ^transcript ^and ^tape ^of ^his ^comments ^in ^the ^question ^and ^answer ^session. [9]Goldin ^also ^reported ^that ^at ^his ^Los ^Angeles ^book ^launch ^a ^man ^in ^the ^audience ^challenged ^Stossel's ^exhortations ^on ^the ^benefits ^of ^free ^market ^capitalism. ^"During ^the ^electrical ^crisis ^L.A. ^was ^the ^only ^place ^that ^wasn't ^affected ^because ^we ^had ^public ^power. ^Meanwhile, ^Enron ^stole ^billions ^of ^dollars," ^he ^said.In ^response ^Stossel ^claimed ^the ^collapse ^of ^Enron ^proved ^that ^the ^system ^worked. ^"There ^are ^no ^big ^national ^scams ^except ^for ^Enron. ^Because ^markets ^figure ^it ^out. ^Not ^the ^government. ^Enron ^is ^an ^example ^of ^how ^well ^the ^market ^worked ^for ^people. ^Enron's ^stock ^came ^tumbling ^down. ^When ^the ^government ^fails, ^we ^give ^them ^more ^money. ^So, ^yes, ^there ^are ^Enrons, ^but ^the ^exception ^proves ^the ^rule," ^he ^said. ^< ^ref ^name="choirboys" ^/>In ^response ^to ^Stossel's ^letter, ^Golden ^expressed ^his ^amazement ^at ^the ^claim ^that ^the Enron ^collapse was ^an ^example ^of ^the ^market ^working. ^"Enron ^collapsed ^not ^due ^to ^a ^stock ^tumble ^but ^because ^government ^investigations ^disclosed ^accounting ^fraud, ^and ^Ken ^Lay's ^Ponzi ^scheme ^was ^exposed. ^Most ^investors ^lost ^their ^shirts, ^and ^thousands ^of ^Enron ^employees ^lost ^their ^jobs. ^That's ^"how ^well ^the ^market ^works ^for ^people"? ^Perhaps ^we ^should ^ask, ^if ^John ^Stossel ^wasn't ^drinking ^a ^vodka ^tonic, ^what ^was ^he ^drinking?," ^he ^wrote. [8]Appearing ^on ^the Al ^Franken show ^07/22/2004, ^Stossel ^was ^challenged ^about ^his ^book's ^claim ^that ^the ^government ^spends ^nearly ^$10,000 ^per ^poor ^person. ^Flipping ^through ^the ^galleys ^for ^the ^book, ^Franken ^noticed ^this ^figure ^and ^expressed ^skepticism. ^He ^found ^the ^figure ^was ^calculated ^by ^dividing ^the ^amount ^spent ^on ^means-tested ^programs ^divided ^by ^the ^number ^of ^poor ^people. ^This, ^Franken ^pointed ^out, ^was ^absurd ^because ^lots ^of ^means-tested ^money ^goes ^to ^people ^above ^the ^poverty ^line. ^Stossel ^promised ^he ^would ^fix ^this ^but ^in ^the ^published ^book ^he ^makes ^the ^same ^mistake, ^but ^cites ^a ^think ^tank. ^Franken ^called ^the ^think ^tank ^about ^the ^issue, ^and ^after ^two ^days ^of ^searching ^for ^where ^they ^had ^published ^the ^number, ^they ^concluded ^Stossel ^got ^it ^using ^the ^same ^division ^method. ^Franken ^challenged ^Stossel ^about ^this ^live ^in ^studio; ^Stossel ^denied ^that ^this ^was ^how ^it ^was ^calculated.In ^a ^December ^2003 ^commentary ^in ^the New ^York ^Post, ^Stossel ^explained ^his ^research ^methods. ^Recounting ^the ^concern ^expressed ^about ^the ^presence ^of ^acrylamides, ^which ^are ^formed ^by ^frying ^high-carbohydrate ^foods, ^Stossel ^wrote ^that ^"when ^scares ^like ^that ^cross ^my ^desk, ^I ^often ^turn ^to ^the American ^Council ^on ^Science ^and ^Health"."The ^scientists ^at ^ACSH ^were ^quickly ^able ^to ^put ^the ^hyperbole ^in ^perspective ^- ^noting ^that ^acrylamides ^could ^be ^detected ^in ^a ^wide ^range ^of ^foods, ^not ^just ^snacks ^like ^French ^fries ^(which ^are ^easier ^to ^make ^people ^feel ^guilty ^about). ^They ^noted ^that ^the ^fact ^that ^high ^dose ^exposure ^to ^acrylamides ^caused ^rodent ^tumors ^had ^no ^relevance ^in ^predicting ^human ^cancer ^risk," ^he ^wrote. [10]Worried ^in ^AmericaIn ^February ^2007, ^a ^two ^hour ^feature, ^"Worried ^in ^America"", ^was ^presented ^by ^Stossel. ^"There's ^a ^lot ^to ^be ^scared ^about. ^The ^media ^hit ^us ^with ^endless ^warnings: ^terrorism, ^bird ^flu, ^vicious ^crime, ^cancer, ^global ^warming ^and ^much ^more. ^But ^are ^all ^worries ^created ^equal? ^It ^turns ^out ^that ^what ^we ^worry ^about ^is ^often ^different ^from ^what's ^most ^likely ^to ^hurt ^us," ^he ^wrote ^on ^the ^ABC ^website. [11]Book

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