the daily snivel

While flipping through the channels on another pointless Friday night of staying in and listlessly writing an essay, I stumbled across the smarmy voice and mustachioed face of ABC 20/20 co-anchor John Stossel, a self-satisfied reporter I hadn't seen in quite some time. But I'd always associated him with the sort of slanted journalism that comes from quick conclusions and innuendo and just a soupcon of ideology-powered sensationalism. He's always reminded me of that sleazy reporter who gets electrocuted Tazered by Bonnie Bedelia ("Mrs. McClane") in Die Hard 2: Die Harder.

Anyway, I just couldn't turn away because tonight was a full 20/20 special on some "Myths, Lies and Nasty Behavior" that frankly had me surprised and even a little upset. These great hits included libertarian rants about how sharing is bad, because littering and the depletion of the world's ocean fisheries was the fault of the "tragedy of the commons" and that privatization could solve woes like elephant poaching. He also argued that foreign outsourcing of labour actually created more jobs (and without looking at the numbers I might grant that maybe this could be true in total, but query whether the jobs created were full-time or had benefits, which Stossel did not). He then argued that subsidizing farmers was a waste of money that did nothing to sustain agriculture. Again, I'm just jerking my knee and not diverting my attention from my very-important-essay-due-on-Monday to do extra research, but I already see a contradiction between two of his express arguments (1. farmers who can't stay profitable should just go out of business that's the way the system works and we shouldn't reward inefficiency, vs. 2. businesses that aren't profitable should outsource their labour overseas because if they went out of business that would be bad, oh think of the children). Which isn't to say there are plenty of problems with subsidies, like the vast amount that goes to huge agribusiness. But it's just intellectual laziness to say, farmers are welfare queens and that's bad, m'kay?

Next is the argument that suburban sprawl is good for America, and that 95% of America is undeveloped and that must mean there's tons of room to grow. I've seen this kind of lazy math as frequently popping up in Stossel's arguments in the tiny bit of Google-research I did do in my tizzy tonight. Basically he's looking at the total land area of the United States and dividing it against the developed land area -- evidently not taking into account the large areas with small populations like Alaska, where development is always going to be limited. Nor does he take into account how much arable land is being consumed, and wetlands drained, by urban sprawl, which is one of the real arguments against it. Stossel then states policies limiting urban sprawl mean that "poor people can't have back yards," because property values go up when urban sprawl is constrained, and "what some people call sprawl, others call homes they can afford." But, I'm sorry, suburban developments are generally new homes that are quite pricey (and would be more expensive if urban areas didn't subsidize suburban living through property taxes, given their inordinate usage of spread-out infrastructure) and out of the price range of poorer buyers, especially younger buyers. My brother and sister-in-law just bought a house in Vanier (an old, established, traditionally working class and French-speaking neighbourhood) that will be quite lovely for a first home, but certainly isn't new, and they certainly wouldn't have been able to afford such a home in new, sprawling Orleans or Kanata, which are the suburban developments spreading out from Ottawa. The only link to reality that Stossel's argument has is: "richer people buy new homes in the suburbs and that means there's more older homes for poor people to buy" -- but again, query whether those of us who live in established neighbourhoods, especially built-up urban areas, are subsidizing these new suburbs with property taxes, and whether suburbs consume more than they contribute.

Anyway, I was ticked. Stossel is, unsurprisingly, widely quoted on conservative websites and forums, which is unfortunate and ironic given that his sloppy research methods and intellectual dishonesty put to shame any critique of those of their hated "librul" foe, Michael Moore. I looked up some good refutations on-line, and thought I'd include them here for reference:

Fair.org on John Stossel. They do, among other things, a great job with his book, Give Me A Break.

For example:

At the core of much of Stossel's reporting is his fervent belief in the efficiency and justice of laissez-faire capitalism, and the evils of most forms of government regulation. To Stossel, a fact like persistent U.S. income inequality is merely dogma circulated by lazy journalists who don't know the truth. But it is Stossel's reporting that often gets it backward. In his "Greed" special (2/3/98), Stossel reported that while management compensation had increased in the past 15 years, "that doesn't mean the workers were hurt. Factory wages were up, too--up 70 percent." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the time the show aired, wages for manufacturing workers had risen 55 percent since January 1983. But Stossel's real statistical sleight of hand is that he didn't adjust for inflation. Taking inflation into account--which is indispensable for determining whether "workers were hurt"-- factory workers' real wages fell by more than 6 percent between 1983 and 1998.

Stossel's rhetoric on poverty relies on similarly mistaken statistical formulas. Consider this claim (1/27/01): "America now spends about $40,000 a year on every family of four below the poverty line.... You could just cut them a check for that and they'd be out of poverty." This figure seems to derive from the work of Heritage Foundation welfare analyst Robert Rector, whom Stossel had cited in previous specials. In a 1995 book, Rector calculated that the government spent $324 billion on "welfare." When that number was divided by the number of families then below the poverty line, the result was roughly $40,000. The problem? Rector's number for total "welfare" spending includes programs that go to millions of non-poor families--including spending on Medicare and Medicaid, two of the most expensive government programs. Rector takes this total amount, and then divides this by the number of poor people alone. Such a figure tells you nothing about what benefits to poor people alone actually cost.

See also Sourcewatch:

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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. [2]

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". [3]

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." [4]

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. [5]

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. [6]

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.

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"Meh," I say to you in my passionate throes of unimpressed disdain, John Stossel. A thousand times "meh."