John Stossel-Mr.Pro-Biotech,
Anti-Organic Exposed

FEATURE STORY | January 7, 2002

A Teflon Correspondent
by MARK DOWIE
THE NATION

"All roles of journalists must be played by journalists (duh!)."
--David Westin, president of ABC News, discussing Leonardo DiCaprio's
interview of Bill Clinton

John Stossel, television's million-dollar bonus baby, has given new meaning to
the old journalistic maxim "Follow the money." People who worked with him in
the early 1980s at WCBS-TV in New York remember an easygoing, dedicated
reporter who produced reliable though somewhat lightweight stories exposing a
vast array of minor consumer frauds and business abuses. Ralph Nader liked
him. "But that was when the 'little guy' was the zeitgeist," a WCBS colleague
recalls. "Now it's big business." And Stossel followed the zeitgeist, a move
that has paid off handsomely for him and his current employer, ABC News.

In the early 1980s news was still a serious factor in television programming.
Broadcast executives at diversified TV networks remembered and occasionally
quoted William Paley's legendary memo in which he said news was a public
service that, if done right, was very difficult to make a profit on. No
problem, said Paley (unchallenged at the time by corporate bean counters); the
network would make back, through its entertainment division, any losses
incurred by the news division.

But one by one, the three original networks were acquired by corporate owners
with little if any interest in reliable news or public service. Entertainment
was where the money was. By the mid-1980s broadcast executives were taking
notice of minute-by-minute ratings and the large, seductive eyes of new
"talent." Network news divisions were designated as profit centers and news
itself became a product, sold like everything else to Madison Avenue. Even so,
news was still serious, most of it broadcast without background music,
ubiquitous logos or crisis slogans.

When attention ("attracting eyeballs") became the primary goal of programming
in the early 1990s, however, professional attention-grabbers like John
McLaughlin, Howard Stern, Bill O'Reilly, Don Imus and Chris Matthews became
free-market winners. By cleverly blending blue-collar social values with Wall
Street economic values, they got rich. And a handsome young Princeton
graduate, confused about his politics but certain of his ambition, followed
their lead. He dropped the Naderite stories, became a hero of the libertarian
right and got rich.

Steve Wilson, another of Stossel's early WCBS colleagues, now an investigative
reporter at WXYZ in Detroit, was surprised enough by Stossel's rapid rise to
stardom and his pro-corporate transformation to ask about it. "I ran into him
one day, kidded him about his metamorphosis and asked what had happened,"
Wilson recalls. "'I got a little older,' John answered. 'Liked the idea of
making real money. So started looking at things a little differently.'"

Alarmed at his old friend's sudden mutation, Wilson called another former WCBS
reporter, Arnold Diaz, who had also moved over to ABC (though as a lowly
consumer reporter, at a fraction of Stossel's wage). "What happened to
Stossel?" Wilson asked Diaz. Diaz was circumspect, as everyone at ABC is when
discussing high-priced talent. "They let him get away with a lot here," Wilson
says Diaz answered. "But they don't call him a journalist anymore."

What Diaz said may be true internally, but for its viewers ABC still packages
Stossel as a reporter--a dogged, take-no-prisoners investigator. But they
allow him to play by a vastly different set of rules than mainline reporters
like Tom Jarrell, Lynn Sherr, John Miller and Brian Ross, who are held to
strict standards prescribed in a 100-page manual of professional and ethical
practices compiled and distributed by former ABC News president Roone Arledge
in 1994. Although Arledge is long gone, replaced by a lawyer with limited news
experience, all employees are still required to read the manual and sign a
form saying they've done so. By all indications, the standards are only
invoked when the network needs an excuse to fire someone. Were they strictly
enforced, John Stossel might also be long gone, as he appears to have violated
them repeatedly. For example, the standards caution that "especially when
there is controversy or accusation, give the person speaking his or her best
shot in the context of the report." But when Stossel did a show trashing
organic food, he not only badgered Katherine DiMatteo, executive director of
the Organic Trade Association, but also took some of her remarks out of
context and left on the cutting-room floor comments that would have balanced
those of the program's main organic food opponent (see "Food Fight," this
issue).

When Stossel's "reporting" becomes too incendiary or opinionated, the network
simply flashes the subtitle "Commentary" under his face, as it did during his
self-declared proudest achievement, a special on risk titled "Are We Scaring
Ourselves to Death?" when he turned to the camera, clenched his lantern jaw
and asked, "What if simply having so many regulations kills people?" Two
producers working on that special were so disturbed by Stossel's writing and
editing, and so frustrated by his unwillingness to air anyone who believed
that lowering risk meant reducing injury, that they left ABC halfway through
production.

Stossel acknowledges his political mutation but says there was no epiphany.
Earlier, he had simply "bought into what was trendy," he told Reason magazine
years after his transformation. Then he stopped himself. "Trendy is
harsh--what was prevailing wisdom at the time, which was that capitalism is
useful but evil," he said. He believed then "that markets are cruel and that
we need aggressive consumer regulation...to protect the consumer from being
victimized." He said he gradually came to realize "that regulation rarely
worked on even the most obvious of crooks, that people selling breast
enlargers and penis enlargers...would get away with it." From that observation
Stossel drew the conclusion that "freedom works" and that regulation of
business makes no sense whatsoever. (He declined repeated requests to be
interviewed for this story.)

This transformation turned Stossel overnight into a journalist whom corporate
advertisers could love and support. And that made him into an asset ABC bean
counters could not afford to lose. When Rupert Murdoch took a shine to Stossel
toward the end of the 1990s--no one involved will be more specific--a quiet
bidding war ensued between ABC and Fox Broadcasting. Of course Stossel won, as
he would have no matter which network prevailed. He signed a seven-figure,
three-year contract with ABC and gained the right to produce four one-hour
specials a year on topics of his choice, along with a staff of eight
assistants to produce them.

In those specials and his regular "Give Me a Break" column on 20/20, Stossel
expresses his politics through story topics like Chilean Social Security
(totally privatized, and for Stossel the way to go, despite the loss of
benefits to millions of Chileans), government regulation (which Stossel
regards as thuggish paternalism), tort lawyers (ambulance-chasing
bloodsuckers), environmental education (green "scaremongers" terrifying
innocent schoolchildren), chemical sensitivity (pushed by whiny hypochondriacs
exploited by greedy doctors), greed (a good thing for the economy), risk (the
distorted creation of "junk science"), Erin Brockovich (all wet about PG&E),
disabled Americans (a powerful lobby that's costing business billions),
product liability (crackpot lawsuits), school-bus seatbelts (a waste of money)
and an hourlong special, loaded with spurious statistical data, claiming that
by any measure of social or economic strength America is "Number One."

From the beginning, Stossel has had his detractors. Lowell Bergman, who left
ABC in 1983 to join CBS's 60 Minutes, recalls, "I was Stossel's first producer
at ABC. They sent him to me while I was working on a CIA story in Mexico. They
parachuted him in to be my correspondent. He was a maniac, a know-nothing who
wanted to impose himself on the story, without having a clue what it was
about. When we got back to New York, I wouldn't let him into the editing
room." Bergman is not alone. At least six ABC producers and editors have told
management they refuse to work with Stossel. Others to whom I spoke said they
hoped they would never be assigned to do so.

Stossel is unique and too odd to be considered typical. But what he
represents, as I learned from scores of on- and off-the-record interviews with
people high and low in the television business, is the single-minded focus on
money that has come to define how the networks operate, including their news
divisions. "The sad thing about Stossel and his ascendancy," says Bergman, now
a producer and correspondent for PBS's Frontline, "is that he is the future.
He symbolizes the transformation of news into ideological entertainment."

John Stossel was discovered by Victor Neufeld, at one time the executive
producer of 20/20 and now overseer of all of ABC's magazine shows. "Invented"
might be a better word, because as boss, mentor, champion, defender, friend,
Neufeld remade Stossel from an ordinary beat reporter into a high-profile
correspondent. Neufeld, although "not a news visionary," according to one of
his producers, does know better than most broadcast executives what works on
television. "He has a gut sense of what people want," says the producer:
"controversy and likability." Stossel thrives on controversy, and has
Q-ratings any correspondent would die for.

Q-ratings, which are based on focus interviews, measure likability. They are
essentially emotional responses of viewers to face and voice, and have nothing
to do with content, credibility or journalistic integrity. Though few anchors
or correspondents care to admit it, Q-ratings are a vital currency for TV
talent. Stossel's most impressive Q-ratings are found among the all-important
commercial demographic group of middle-aged, middle-class, mid-American women,
who recognize him immediately and find him "attractive," "honest" and "open."

High Q-ratings are worth millions in contract negotiations. The public rarely
learns how much talent is really paid, but wild rumors circulate of
multimillion-dollar salaries paid to Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, Diane
Sawyer and John Stossel. "They're all exaggerated," according to talent agent
Richard Leibner, who negotiated a contract for Stossel that most ABC producers
I spoke to believe is in the range of $2-$4 million a year. One such producer
told me, "We never know what correspondents make, but if it was less than ten
times what we make, they'd probably admit it." Her income, she said, was "low
six figures--very low."

Stossel's "The Food You Eat," an organic food and farming story that aired on
February 4, 2000, was heaven-sent to Neufeld: innocent consumers ripped off by
a self-righteous $6 billion industry making false claims about the nutrition
and safety of organic produce. It was perfect fare for a ratings-obsessed
executive who, when he wasn't wandering through the office tearing pages out
of People and handing them out as story ideas, was teasing his correspondents
about the minute-by-minute ratings reports on their latest segments. Before he
moved upstairs, Neufeld ran a betting pool over which news events would and
would not prompt viewers to switch channels. His own favorites--one about a
pen pal to serial killers, another about an armless aerobics instructor and a
third, an hourlong visit with two New York hookers--had viewers glued to their
tubes. Neufeld won his bets. "We try to do good journalism at the same time
that we get watched," he later told The New Yorker.

Neufeld knew the organics spot would grab and hold a huge market share.
"Killer food" stories always do. So he would shoot for "sweeps," those magic
weeks during which ratings determine advertising rates for the season to
follow. It's probably also safe to assume that Neufeld's wife, Lois, a New
York PR practitioner with major clients in the chemical industry, would have
been pleased when Victor came home to report the scheduled broadcast of a show
defending the agricultural use of pesticides, herbicides, rodenticides,
fungicides, soil sterilants and synthetic fertilizers--all forbidden under
state and federal organic standards.

Trashing organics was also a golden opportunity for a rising star of the
libertarian think-tank community and darling of corporate polluters to advance
a speaking career on the anti-regulatory rubber-chicken circuit, which earns
Stossel more than $200,000 a year. Stossel himself has talked about the
"absurdly high honoraria" paid by people who "like to be told they are good
guys." His ABC contract forbids him to keep any of his speaking fees, so the
money goes to a charitable entity called the Palmer R. Chitester Fund, which
buys videos of Stossel's ABC specials and packages them for classroom viewing
with study guides footnoting the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Young
America's Foundation and the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page. Episodes sell for
about $40 a copy ($160 for the series), under the brand name "Stossel in the
Classroom." (For more on Stossel's classroom connections, see "The Right in
the Classroom," by Marianne Manilov, at www.thenation.com.)

However, as Stossel ascended to media stardom and attained hero status on the
libertarian right, he became a major headache for the executive suite at ABC
headquarters. "They are terrified of dealing with the guy as a journalist,"
one veteran reporter told me. "He's a pain in the ass who keeps some of the
best minds on the fifth floor in perpetual damage control. But I guess he's
worth the effort, because although they're horrified by his behavior, they
keep him on. He's a cash cow." He's also ABC's best protection against the
"liberal media" indictment.

Of course, all media outlets should have contrarians on hand to puncture
sanctimonious claims from all sides of the great arguments of our time. But
contrarians should be smart, courageous and willing to air the positions of
adversaries, even debate with them in public. And if they are going to be
packaged and marketed as journalists, contrarians should be held to the same
standards as any other journalists. There are many people, some of them
seemingly powerful professionals and executives at the networks, who agree
with that sentiment. But they are not running the show.

An easy solution would be for ABC to change Stossel's title from
"correspondent" to "commentator," his role from reporter to pundit, or better
yet move him from News to Entertainment. Then replace him with a real
journalist and assign that person to cover the challenging and controversial
topics of our times in a fair and professional manner. Otherwise, at the
beginning of each special, Stossel should simply offer this public confession:
"I'm not a journalist, but I play one on TV."

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