Give Me A Break

How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media

By John Stossel

Harper Collins 2004 Hardcover Buy here

Book Review
Reviewed by Todd Seavey

For years, John Stossel's "Give Me A Break" reports on ABC's popular weekly news show 20/20 and his hour-long specials have brought stories on failed regulations and government programs into the homes of millions of Americans.

Stossel's new book – partly drawn from his numerous broadcasts – gives a sense of his intellectual journey from a Ralph Nader-type consumer advocate in the 1970s to his self-described libertarian perspective today.  Since he began with no journalistic aspirations and a degree from Princeton University in psychology, Stossel's 19 Emmy Awards and current position as co-anchor for ABC's 20/20 make for an inspiring story – but he paints a somewhat bleak picture of what a proponent of liberty is up against in today's media climate.

After his start as a researcher for a Portland, Oregon station, Stossel became increasingly focused on consumer reporting.  As time went on, he became skeptical about the regulation that were supposed to put a stop to the scams he was uncovering.

"Snake oil sellers sell it anyway...Crooks and deluded optimists sold useless baldness remedies, breast enlargers, and diet products regardless of what the law said...[G]overnment was too incompetent to stop the crooks."  While the crooks kept pulling their smalltime scams, usually making little money in the process, regulations were hampering the real innovators and diminishing freedom.

****

During the 1980s, Stossel was inspired to look at things in a by Berkeley political science professor Aaron Wildavsky, to whom Stossel's book is dedicated and who criticized the impossible goal of a "riskless society."  As Stossel relates, one of the first overtly libertarian pieces he did for ABC News's 20/20 (of which he has since become co-anchor) was a look at the benefits of deregulation.  Broadcast on December 29, 1989, "Relaxing the Rules" was a look back at the flawed conventional wisdom about the amazing decade of 1980-1989.  That piece brought together many of the elements that would become Stossel staples: a contrarian tone, a libertarian political message, a warning against excessive risk aversion, and criticism of other journalists, including those at ABC News, for hyping petty fears and missing the positive big picture.

"Relaxing the Rules" was also the first step, I should note, toward my later stint working for Stossel.  I watched it while home on winter break from a Marxist-filled college, was fortunate enough five years later to be a humble civilian in the studio audience for Stossel's first one-hour special (Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death? – a show about irrational risk assessment), and went on to work as a researcher and associate producer on his specials from 1995 to 2001.

The popular culture was unusually receptive to libertarian ideas during that period (stretching roughly from the first year of the Newt Gingrich-led Congress to just before the September 11 attacks).  The stock market was booming, talk of budget cuts was socially acceptable albeit rarely acted upon, military issues were on the back burner, and technological innovation was popular with everyone from Wall Streeters to nose-ringed club kids.  It was a perfect time for Stossel to do pro-market hours with titles like The Trouble with Lawyers, Freeloaders, Greed, and Is America #1?

But Stossel knows Americans are wary of radicalism of any stripe.  So, in most of his broadcasts, he prefers the role of moderate skeptic, faced with absurd regulations and boondoggles that would alarm anyone possessing common sense, regardless of faction.  In his book, for instance, he recounts on-air exposés of the Department of the Interior's loss of some $2 billion (and then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's complete loss of composure while being interviewed about it by Stossel), Donald Trump's attempt to force an old woman out of her house through eminent domain, and the death-by-regulation of an effort to bring public pay toilets to New York City.  He describes government licensing boards' tendency to function as de facto shakedown artists, safety regulations that kill more people than they save, and a $330,000 outhouse the Parks Department built in Pennsylvania.

With countless such examples, the book also teaches a deeper lesson about the need to weigh costs and benefits, using a little populist outrage and pragmatism to teach economics.  Stossel says of Los Angeles's grandiose but little-used subway system:

"There is no 'mass' in Los Angeles's mass transit.  A Reason Foundation study found that today's new rail lines are so underused, each ride costs taxpayers $9.

"Subsidizing buses would have been much cheaper.  Even paying for people's taxi rides might have been cheaper.  But buses and taxis aren't sexy enough for politicians with grand visions."

Similarly, Stossel the abstract concept of "focused benefits and diffuse costs" - the fundamental con by which government pleases some while robbing the rest - and turns it into a familiar cry of voter frustration:

"If sheep and goat ranchers get $200 million in handouts, it costs each of us less than a buck.  What are you going to do about that?  Go to Washington and protest?  I doubt it.  For a buck, you probably won't even write your congressman, let alone take him out to dinner or give him a $2,000 campaign contribution."

Stossel bounces back and forth in a lively and entertaining fashion between personal anecdotes, summaries of his TV investigations, and broader moral lessons, as when he describes the beach house that he built on flood-prone coastal land thanks to taxpayer-subsidized flood insurance.  His analogies between everyday, personal freeloading and the giant-sized waste endemic to government make this volume ideal for open-minded newcomers to free-market ideas -- and amusing for people who know the ideas already but would like to see some examples of those ideas in action.

Stossel gives credit to the people who taught him these ideas along the way, including Reason magazine and the Cato Institute.  More important, though, he acknowledges that these ideas were part of America's very beginning: "The founders' vision of _limited_ government is one of the greatest philosophical achievements of humanity because it protects people while leaving them free to pursue their own interests.  That freedom is what makes so many other good and creative things possible."

***

However noble limited-government ideas may be, though, Stossel complains that they aren't any easy sell these days, and he has the media battle scars to prove it.  His willingness to describe in frank terms what an uphill battle it is makes Give Me a Break all the more dramatic.  Stossel notes, for example, that he used to win Emmys regularly but stopped getting awards when he switched tracks from consumer reporting to government criticizing (even though he sees the latter as a logical extension of the former, with government being the biggest rip-off of all).  He reprints some of the venomous hate mail he has received and describes encounters with irate viewers like the one who approached him and said, "[Y]ou are evil.  I really hope you die soon."

Wisely, since so many people think free-marketeers are heartless monsters, Stossel devotes an entire chapter to addressing the question "But What About the Poor?"  His arguments about capitalism's ability to lift people out of poverty will do little, though, to assuage some of his critics inside and outside of media (such as the Stossel-hating staff of the leftist media watchdog group called FAIR and the activists at the green public interest watchdog operation called the Environmental Working Group).  One of Stossel's many personal confessions in the book is the fact that he hasn't even converted his own wife despite years of argument, and he admits once throwing cake at her in frustration.

Give Me a Break makes the case that anti-capitalism informs the decisions made every day in TV news.  In that sense, Stossel's book will be thought of by many readers as akin to other recent attacks on liberal media bias - Ann Coulter's Slander, and Bernard Goldberg's Bias.  However, Stossel brings greater subtlety to his analysis.  He's still a prominent part of that liberal news world, so he knows from first-hand experience that ABC executives in some sense want to be balanced, want to think of themselves as fair, and want to give Stossel a chance to speak his mind, even if they find him baffling.  Unlike Coulter, Stossel doesn't think that liberal reporters and news editors are hate-fueled fiends out to destroy America.  He remembers his own well-meaning but anti-capitalist attitude when he was fighting consumer rip-offs in the 1970s:

"I wanted the government to do something to stop the crooks, to compensate the victims.  After I spent time with the victims listening to their sad stories, I was angry.  I wanted someone to help those people.  What was the purpose of government if it couldn't protect them?"

Stossel's fellow reporters aren't a conscious conspiracy, he assures us.  They're just part of a culture that has certain favorite stories, usually ones that with some horrible risk imposed on the public by unfettered freedom and end with a heroic trial lawyer or government regulator coming to the rescue.  Tell a story that is nearly the opposite of that narrative, as Stossel often does, and it's as if you've deliberately sided with evil.  That first Stossel one-hour special (the one for which I was in the studio audience), Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?, made the case that the media obsess over chemical residues on vegetables and other petty or non-existent risks, largely ignoring much bigger, real (but boring and familiar) risks such as smoking and strokes.  It sounded like common sense to some of us in the audience, but as Stossel recounts, when he tried to add a concluding monologue to the broadcast about the possibility that regulations do more to kill people - by causing poverty - than to save them, two producers walked off the show, and ABC made Stossel put the word "commentary" at the bottom of the screen.

By taking us inside the TV news production process, Stossel shows us how he fights a battle for liberty on multiple levels: against the bureaucrats and activists he confronts in interviews, against a sometimes-reluctant ABC bureaucracy overseen by lawyers, and against the prevailing pro-government culture that exists in elite media circles and, to a lesser degree, throughout the general population.  Can Stossel carve out a unique libertarian niche for himself in that world without marginalizing himself at the same time?  He isn't sure about that himself, but happily his promotion by book's end to co-anchor of ABC's flagship news magazine show, 20/20, suggests that his contrarianism, against all odds, is paying off.