There’s a brief article in New York Magazine about libertarian John Stossel. Stossel now has his own show on the Fox Business Network, after almost thirty years at ABC. (Fox Business and Fox News are different channels.)
The article shares a few tidbits that one may not have heard before, including the enmity that the late Peter Jennings held for Stossel, disliking Stossel’s advocacy journalism. (Too funny, really, that Jennings saw advocacy in Stossel, but didn’t seem to notice his own consistent advocacy, including a lamentable bias against Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy. Here, I am quite sure the advantage is Stossel’s.)
What’s on the calendar for Stossel? The article mentions that he’s “editing an upcoming special called What’s Great About America, in which he celebrates, among other things, racial tolerance and the entrepreneurial spirit.” Stossel has critics, too:
A guy came up to me recently and said, “I hope you die soon,” Stossel says. “A lawyer from Legal Aid. He viewed my reporting as an attack on the poor because I said government doesn’t help. I find that interesting. People forget that before we had a welfare system there were these mutual-aid societies that were ethnically exclusionary: Koreans helping Koreans, blacks helping blacks. They knew better who needed help and who needed a kick in the ass.”
Stossel’s show airs Thursdays at 7 p.m. central on the Fox Business Channel.
See, Tea-Vee Time. (The title’s an anachronism: most libertarians easily pre-date the Tea Party movement, a movement that is, in any event, only partly libertarian.)