John Stossel. Liberalism. Feminism. Environmentalism.

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The following is from John Stossel. Give Me a Break. pp. 179 - 192

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Distrust all men in

whom the impulse to

punish is powerful.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Where I work (in network TV) and live (on the Upper West Side of Manhattan), they say "conservative" the way they say "child molester." It's the worst thing to be called. Everyone here agrees: Conservatives are repressive, uptight, fearful of new things, and above all, indifferent to the suffering of the poor.

People here talk about the "far right, extreme right, hard right, religious right, unapologetic right," but never about a "left." What you might call "the left" doesn't exist in my neighborhood. It's just enlightened thinking to favor more safety and environmental rules, tougher gun control, abortion on demand, and higher taxes to fund good-government projects.

Anyone who disagrees is seen as not just wrong, but selfish and cruel. Once at a dinner party, I found myself arguing that the welfare state perpetuated poverty; the other guests shrieked at me, and then my wife jumped in—on their side. I was so dismayed by that, I threw a piece of cake at her. (And it was a cake she had baked.) I was upset because I'd spent years discussing these ideas with her, and thought she'd come to see their value. But at that dinner party, I was an alien, even to my own wife.

Leftist thinking is simply the culture I swim in. More property programs? More safety regulation? Who could not want that? Everyone I know wants that. When I question other reporters about bias, I get blank stares. It's like asking fish about water. "What water?" say the fish.

The hometown newspaper for most everyone in my business is the New York Times. It shouldn't have much influence, because its readership is so small—about a million people a day (compared to the networks' 30 million viewers), and I assume readers who reach, say, page A16 total only a few thousand. Yet the New York Times matters more because other media copy it — sycophantically. When I worked at WCBS-TV, the editor clipped articles from that morning's Times and gave them to us as our assignments. The newscast was a video version of the Times (shorter and dumber because we did only the most TV-friendly stories). That's how bias in the Times becomes bias on TV, not to mention in Time, Newsweek, and the rest.

On August 19, 2000, the front page of the New York Times featured a picture of the North Pole; the accompanying news story said: "The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water ... something that has presumably never before been seen by humans and is more evidence that global warming may be real and already affecting climate."

Oops . . . Ten days later the Times apologized, saying it "misstated the normal conditions of the sea ice there. A clear spot has probably opened at the pole before, scientists say, because about 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean is clear of ice in a typical summer."

But by then the Washington Post, USA Today, AP, NPR, American TV networks, Canadian TV, and papers in London had repeated the story. NBC Nightly News talked about "a mile-wide stretch of water where ice should be." CNN said the ice cap "is losing its ice." CNN, CBS, and Canadian TV interviewed the same "global warming expert" who was quoted by the Times.

THAT CONSERVATIVE ON ABC

This media climate helps explain why some people call me "that conservative on ABC."

I'm hardly what I would call conservative. I happen to think consenting adults should be able to do just about anything they want. I think prostitution should be permitted. (If quarterbacks and boxers make money with their bodies, why can't a woman make money with hers?) I believe homosexuality is perfectly natural, that the drug war should be ended, that flag burning and foul language should be tolerated, and most abortion should be legal. This is conservative? Real conservatives should be insulted.

But the mainstream media are tilted so far to the left that they call me conservative.

I guess they call me that because I believe the free market is a good thing—but what's conservative about the market? It's unplanned, unpredictable, scary, noisy. "Libertarian" is a better term for my beliefs. But it's a lousy word. People think it means "libertine," and the Libertarian Party has had flaky people like Howard Stern run for office. Maybe "classical liberal" is a better term for what I am. Liberals were originally the ones who advocated freedom and tolerance.

Not lately.

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BOYS AND GIRLS ARE DIFFERENT

My first special after "Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?" was "Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women, and the Sex Difference "

Strangely, saying that boys and girls are different was controversial on network television in 1995. My boss, executive producer Victor Neufeld, said, "You are going to catch hell for this one."

All I said in the show was that gender differences are probably not entirely the result of sexist child-raising and sexist media propaganda, that research now suggests there are genuine differences in the way men's and women's brains operate. At conception both sexes begin life as the same clump of cells, except for the Y chromosome in males. Waves of testosterone must be added for that clump of cells if the fetus is to become male.

Brain researcher Dr. Laura Allen of UCLA told us, "Testosterone kind of rides a roller coaster until birth. We know the first rise of testosterone causes the development of the male sex organs. We don't know what the second rise of testosterone does. I suspect it causes our brains to be different....

"As I began to look at the human brain more and more, I kept finding differences, and about seven or eight out of 10 structures that we actually measured turned out to be different between men and women." Other researchers told us these brain differences may explain why women are often better at reading feelings, men at reading maps.

One could still argue that these differences develop because of some very early sexist parenting, except that differences show up in newborns.

June Reinisch, former director of the Kinsey Institute, told us, "When they look at babies in the first 72 hours of life, they find that males and females are not identical in the way they behave. Males startle more than females. If you give a little puff of air on their abdomen, they [are] much more likely to startle than females," while "females rhythmically mouth, they suck on their tongues, they move their lips and so forth, more than males do." Infant girls sit up without support earlier than boys, while boys crawl away from their caretaker earlier than girls. This happens before parents have much influence.

It wasn't a sexist show. It just said men and women are not the same—that we should celebrate our differences rather than deny they exist. "Equality means that people should have equal opportunities," said June Reinisch. "It doesn't mean that everybody is the same, or that we want everybody to be the same. Difference is good."

This was controversial?

I did "Boys and Girls Are Different" because watching my own kids and their friends made me question what I'd been taught about gender. At Princeton I had absorbed the teachings of the egalitarian wing of the women's movement, and when I started work as a reporter, I believed it totally. Clearly, the horrible history of patriarchal discrimination was the only reason men and women behaved differently. Now that we were enlightened, everything would change. There would still be physical differences, but if parents and society treated boys and girls identically, other gender differences would vanish.

Then I had kids, and saw what an idiot I was.

I was obsessive about eliminating every sexist influence. I pored over my daughter's books and changed the "he's" to "she's?' I prevented my friends and relatives from giving her the "sweet little girl" treatment, and tried to raise her in a totally gender-neutral way. The only video entertainment I brought was She-Ra, Princess of Power. It depicted women as leaders and superheroes.

My gender-neutral parenting didn't take. I threw balls to my daughter, and she drew faces on them. She and her girlfriends talked about things, smiled at me, and looked adults in the eye. My son and his friends kicked the ball, and ran around crashing into walls.

I know this proves nothing. I hadn't controlled all the social influences—and even if I could, my two kids don't make up a trend. But I kept noticing biology at work. I had some aggressively antigun friends who wouldn't allow toy guns in the house; they soon found their sons "shooting" with carrots.

So I started reading more about the science, and quickly learned that it went well beyond Dr. Allen's and the Kinsey Institute's work. There was lots of research that suggested what parents had said for years was true: Males and females are biologically hardwired to be different. The research just hadn't been publicized, because it wasn't politically correct.

My favorite experiments were the ones done at the University of Rochester and York University. Rochester students were blindfolded and then walked through a maze of tunnels that run underneath the campus. Then they were asked how to get to a particular college building. The men said things like "Go through the next doors, take a left and a right, then a left:"

Women said things like "How would I know?"

Men's brains are somehow better at sensing where they are. Women, on the other hand, tend to have a better memory for detail. York University students were asked to wait two minutes in a cluttered room while an experimenter got something ready. That request was a trick. The real purpose of the test was to see what people remembered. After the students left the cluttered room, the experimenter asked what was in the room.

Women gave stunningly detailed answers, like "On the right-hand side of the desk, right here, was a briefcase with your initials at the top. Then there was a clock with an 'I am 40' button on it. In the middle there were York University envelopes. There was a thing of Clearasil and a Bazooka Joe comic. . . ." And so on. Men said things like "What was in there? I dunno ... some stuff:'

[Note. I can confirm this last observation. My wife is very observant of her physical surroundings. I am very unobservant of them. If she and I were to go into some strange office for the first time she afterwards will be able to describe in considerable detail what was in the office and I will be able to tell you very little. J. Miller]

The researchers were just excited about studying why these differences exist. But some feminists said this kind of research shouldn't even be done. I interviewed Gloria Steinem. I'd admired her for what she'd accomplished, and assumed that when I brought up the science, she'd say, "Of course there are differences, but sexism makes them worse:" No. She wouldn't admit any differences! Sexist parenting is what makes boys different, she said dismissively. "We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls:"

Feminist lawyer Gloria Allred appeared on the show to say I shouldn't even be doing the show. "We take attacks from the media on our skills and our abilities and our talents and our dreams very seriously," she said. "This is harmful and damaging to our daughters' lives, and to our mothers' lives, and I'm very angry about it."

What? Is she a leader of the thought police? My show wasn't even an "attack"—it was an attempt to understand differences. It's better to act on the basis of what is true than to maintain that it has no right to be true. And we can't know what's true unless we have free inquiry. Acknowledging gender differences doesn't mean the women's movement was wrong or should be reversed. I don't want it reversed! Who wants to go back to the days when my daughter would be discouraged from becoming a lawyer or doctor, and when men barely got involved with nurturing their children? Nevertheless, the "equality feminists" had become so dominant in academia and the media that they felt they had the right to demand that gender differences should not even be discussed. Free inquiry is often exactly what the left doesn't want.

Dr. Allen said that feminist political correctness was so stifling on many campuses that scientists had been frightened away from trying to study gender. Colleagues told her, "Don't do this kind of research."

Leftist dogma is so pervasive on campuses that the novel ranked "most influential" in their lives by the largest number of readers responding to a Library of Congress and Book of the Month Club survey is almost never even mentioned in women's studies courses, even though the book was written by a woman. The novel is Atlas Shrugged and it continues to sell more than 100,000 copies a year. But the left doesn't want Ayn Rand's ideas discussed.

At the time I did "Boys and Girls Are Different," cities, to get more women into fire departments to avoid accusations of sex discrimination, were "gender-norming" qualification standards. Since men have twice the upper-body strength, some fire departments just dropped the strength test. Kate O'Beirne of the Heritage Foundation put it in perspective: "If I, as an all-suffering taxpayer, have to be evacuated from a building, I used to be carried by a male firefighter. I am now dragged by my ankles, as my head hits every single stair going down three stories. I prefer being carried. I assume most taxpayers prefer being carried."

I passed that thought on to Gloria Steinem. I love her response: "It's better to drag them out because there's less smoke down there. We were probably killing people by carrying them out at that height?'

It was so bizarre, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Then she said sex differences shouldn't even be researched. "It's really the remnant of anti-American, crazy thinking to do this kind of research," O'Beirne says. "It's what's keeping us down, not what's helping us:'

Don't even do the research? It's the censorship by the thought police that's truly un-American.

Tampering with Nature — or with Kids

I learned more about that from the reaction to another special, "Tampering with Nature?" which challenged scaremongers who were preaching environmental doom and gloom.

Living with nature, I pointed out, really means running around naked, maybe killing a rabbit with a rock, then dying young, probably before age 40. That was natural life for most of human history.

Tampering with that way of life has been good for people. While too much tampering can be bad, building houses, and cultivating land and fertilizing it with chemicals, have allowed us to nearly double our life spans without crippling nature.

Yet on Earth Day every year, and in schoolrooms most every day, environmental activists tell kids that humankind is the enemy.

We filmed "environmental educators" telling schoolchildren in Los Angeles that President George W. Bush and his "friends in the oil business" were polluting the land and killing caribou in Alaska. They got the kids to write letters to their congressmen complaining about the President. This they called "nonpartisan" instruction.

I thought the activists were indoctrinating, not educating, children. Afterward, the kids were frightened. They feared massive floods, increased cancer, and drowning in our own garbage. They were convinced America was dying in a sea of pollution. Kids said that because of global warming "Alaska was melting" and "cities will soon be under water."

Boy: Floods will happen, and we won't be able to breathe. And if we can't breathe, we'll probably go extinct.

John Stossel: Is America getting more polluted?

Children: (In unison) Yes.

John Stossel: Is the water and air getting more polluted?

Children: (In unison) Yes.

Why not tell the kids the truth? As I said earlier, the EPA reports that over the past 30 years, the air and water have been getting cleaner. But the kids don't believe it.

John Stossel: The government says over the past 30 years it's been getting cleaner.

Children (All at once): No. They are so wrong. He's lying!

There is a reason the children fear the earth is dying: It's because the environmental movement "has been hijacked by political activists who are using environmental rhetoric to cloak agendas like class warfare and anticorporatism that in fact have almost nothing to do with ecology," said environmentalist Patrick Moore, a former director of Greenpeace who quit the organization. He quit because he came to believe that the environmental movement had become an industry addicted to raising money through unscientific scaremongering.

The biggest scare now is global warming. Here, too, the activists (and the media) tell only part of the story. It made headlines when 1,600 scientists signed a letter warning of the "devastating consequences" of global warming. But I bet you never heard that 17,600 scientists signed a petition saying there's no convincing evidence that greenhouse gases will disrupt the earth's climate. That was less exciting "news!"

There's no doubt that there's been a slight warming, about one degree in the past hundred years, and it looks kind of scary if you isolate that.

But when you get some historical perspective, you see it is not such a big deal. In fact, over the past 10,000 years, there have been big cycles of warming and cooling, and for most of those years, the earth was warmer than it is today.

"Tampering with Nature" pointed out that it is by no means clear that human action affects temperature much, or that "fixes" like the Kyoto treaty would do any good. If the treaty were ever implemented, Kyoto's costs would certainly make life harder for millions of poor people. The "environmental educators" didn't want viewers to hear that, and so they set out to undermine my reporting.

If you watched "Tampering with Nature" you didn't get to see the first group of schoolchildren we interviewed. Just days after consulting with activists, the parents of some of the kids in that first group suddenly withdrew their consent. With the help of the Environmental Working Group, an organization that had been criticizing my reporting and asking ABC to fire me, they distributed a letter claiming I had manipulated their kids.

Their campaign got lots of publicity. "Stossel oughta pick on kids his own size," wrote the New York Daily News. "More underhanded reporting from ABC News" crowed TomPaine.com, the Web site funded by Bill Moyers and his son. "Stossel's Latest Stunt Puts Him at the Back of the Classy?' was the headline in the Chicago Tribune. The New York Times reported that "several parents said they had given ABC permission to interview their children after they had been led to believe that their children would be asked straightforward questions about environmental issues?" However, "Mr. Stossel asked leading questions to get them to say what he wanted?"

I never asked the kids "leading questions." I asked, "Is America getting more polluted?" and "What will happen to the earth?" That was enough to bring out their litany of doom. Some of the parents who later complained were present at the taping. We heard no complaints then. They were all smiles, and many told us it was a "great experience." It was only after the activists got involved that some parents changed their minds about wanting their kids to be on TV. ABC chose to honor their request. We threw out that videotape and interviewed another group of kids. I asked the same questions—and got the same frightened answers.

No one needs to "lead" kids to get them to say things like "Alaska is melting." The activists' indoctrination has misled them about the state of the earth. The activists don't want objective reporting on the environment; they want to scare people. What the Environmental Working Group is afraid of is not bias—it's truth.

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22 June 2024