The latest to trot out the old saw about that danged liberal media? ABC's John Stossel:
John Stossel, who co-anchors 20/20 with Barbara Walters, has accused mainstream journalists, including those at ABC, his own network, of being leftists who view conservatives with hostility. Appearing at the libertarian Cato Institute to promote his new book, Give Me a Break, Stossel commented, "Where I live in Manhattan and where I work at ABC, people say conservative the way people say child molester." As reported by CNSNews.com, a unit of the conservative Media Research Center, Stossel told the group: "Leftist thinking is just the culture that I live in and the culture the reporters who populate the mainstream media live in."
Curiously, ABC's George Will wasn't available to comment on this story.
I can't for the life of me understand why liberals would view some conservatives with hostility, especially since they've been labeled everything from child murderers to Commies to Francophiles for the last twenty years.
But that's beside the point. Stossel - the moustachioed arch-prevaricator of ABC's "news" magazine, 20/20 - dredges up the tired myth while working in a television environment increasingly crowded with fellow fact check-challenged blowhards like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Robert Novak, Dennis Miller, Brit Hume...well, Eric Alterman said it best. Stossel has obviously taken to heart the adage that if one repeats a lie long enough it starts to sound true. Now he's ruined the fun for everyone, however, because anything that comes out of Stossel's mouth is suspect, and has been for some time.
He accused the press of being "filled with hatred for capitalism" and said that in his own case, "Everything I do has to be read by two liberal ABC lawyers and at least two liberal ABC producers." Nevertheless, he added: "ABC, God bless them, they don't always agree with me ... but they let me do most of the things I want to do."
One of the reasons ABC's lawyers have to read Stossel's material is because the network doesn't want another deluge of angry e-mails and calls from subscribers to the Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting newsletter decrying his latest batch of spurious staitistical data and questionable "expert" testimony. He may be getting "liberal bias" confused with "liability," which kind of sounds the same.
Reporters at ABC, and at every other major network, are exactly as liberal or conservative as their corporate masters and adveritisers allow them to be. Stossel, who views himself as some sort of crusader journalist, is dumber than even I thought if he hasn't figured that much out.
And how much credibility can you expect when you look like Michael Medved?