John Stossel Going From ABC News to Fox

John Stossel is leaving ABC News and going to Fox, possibly improving both. This will definitely improve the journalistic integrity of ABC. Fox is the only “news” outlet he could go to where he will not hurt them and actually he might be a slight improvement over many of the others there.

Many other blogs have already noted many of the absurdities which have come out in previous broadcasts by Stossel. In past posts I’ve  primarily noted his ignorant descriptions of health care, which often form the basis of libertarian views on health care issues. I’ve previously posted responses to Stossel on health care here, here, here, and here.

5 Comments

  1. 1
    Eclectic Radical says:

    I remember when John Stossel was one of the better field journalists in television, and his train-wreck into political activism in the guise of journalism has always disappointed me. He’s been doing guest spots on Fox’s various opinion shows for awhile, alternating with Dennis Miller as a guest talking head for shows like The O’Riley Factor. Where Miller’s transition into right wing craziness appears to very clearly be Sept 11th, Stossel’s is harder to pin down.
     
    The irony in his gung-ho libertarianism is that he was the guy who always did the hard-hitting exposes on child labor in the third world for ABC News. If anyone has seen first hand just how horribly wrong the free market can go, it’s Stossel.
     

  2. 2
    Ron Chusid says:

    Pinning down Stossel’s “transition into right wing craziness” comes partially from the relationship between libertarians and conservatives. In recent years far too many libertarians have picked up ideas from the conservative movement.

    It also comes partially from the need to deny reality to be a hard core libertarian. Libertarianism is a great philosophy for high school and college students who support liberty. Once out in the real world it is necessary to either acknowledge that many of the claims made by libertarians do not hold up or to resort to “right wing craziness” and deny reality.

  3. 3
    Eclectic Radical says:

    “Libertarianism is a great philosophy for high school and college students who support liberty.”
     
    The last semester I spent in college was precisely when I was flirting the libertarians… so I certainly can’t deny that. Of course, as an anarcho-socialist I really wasn’t all that welcome amongst anarcho-capitalists anyway. I don’t believe the free market solves problems, I believe the free market profits from them. 😉
     
    I have just always pictured Stossel as the guy on the microphone exposing Kathy Lee Gifford’s kids in Honduras or kids being exploited in factories in India. While I realize a lot of that is one’s assignments as a professional, one would think it would give someone a notion of the flaws in the free market as well as the strengths.
     

  4. 4
    Ron Chusid says:

    The free market does sometimes solve problems. The problem is that you can’t hold it up as a religion, assuming it always acts perfectly. It is also a mistake to think it operates on its own and ignore the necessary government infrastructure and regulation needed for it to work.

  5. 5
    Eclectic Radical says:

    ‘The free market does sometimes solve problems.’
     
    The free market sometimes creates solutions for problems. The free market does not, necessarily, automatically follow the solution to the problem with the application of that solution. The free market has created the solution to the problem of world hunger, through advances in biotech from the 1960s to the 1980s… but the free market has not used that solution to solve the problem of world hunger.
     
    Of course, I’m letting myself get caught up in philosophical abstractions now. 🙂
     
    Neither the free market nor the government solve problems, they are agencies through which people can solve problems if properly utilized and make things much worse if abused.
     

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