News Service July 3, 2001

Journalism Isn't Child's Play
Stossel oughta pick on kids his own size

Wednesday, June 27, 2001
By Eric Mink

The richly deserved humiliation of being forced to apologize on-air to viewers last summer apparently didn't have the desired chastening effect on John Stossel, ABC News' in-house anti-government, anti-regulation hit man.

After apologizing for, essentially, making stuff up in a thrice-broadcast screed against organic food, Stossel now seems to have added the manipulation of little kids to his bag of dirty tricks.

A fresh exhibition of Stossel's sneering scorn is scheduled for Friday night in a special titled "Tampering With Nature." Its targets are environmental concerns, including global warming and genetic engineering. Its theme: What's the big deal?

As part of their "research" for the show, Stossel and his fellow travelers at ABC arranged interviews in April with second-, third- and fourth-graders at the Canyon Charter School in Santa Monica, Calif.

According to an angry letter signed by seven of the kids' parents and sent to Stossel on Monday, the interviews weren't interviews at all. Instead, they charge, it was a session where Stossel asked and re-asked questions until he got material he could edit in such a way as to support his position that schools are force-feeding kids false and frightening information about environmental dangers.

Although it would have been reasonable to expect few of the parents to know who John Stossel was, the parents say his ABC accomplices took no chances and told no one that Stossel would be doing the, ahem, "interviewing."

I wonder: Do you think when Diane Sawyer is scheduled to interview a bunch of thirdgraders, her producers keep it a secret until she walks into the room?

Then again, Stossel and company were headed into what they may have regarded as the belly of the beast: Santa Monica, an oceanside suburb of L.A. favored by wealthy TV and movie creative types, or, as they're sometimes referred to in Stossel's conservative circles, squishy-headed liberals.

Late yesterday, after a puzzlingly intense internal debate, ABC News executives suffered an attack of wisdom and decided to yank the school kids' comments out of the show. Officially, the network reiterated its position that the interviews were conducted "according to the highest journalistic standards" and noted again that the parents had signed permission slips for their kids to participate.

But maybe some of those executives' ABC/Disney Mickey Mouse ears perked up when one of the parents raised the issue of "informed consent" in an interview with the Los Angeles Times and how you can't get informed consent from people who haven't been informed that their kids are being used to score somebody else's ideological points.

Maybe, too, the executives were paying attention three weeks ago when a National Academy of Sciences panel completed a fast-track review, ordered by President Bush, of the existing science on global warming. Their conclusion: There's no scientific doubt that the global climate is warming, and there's no scientific doubt that human activity is responsible.

Kind of sucks the air out of the argument that kids are being brainwashed about the environment by leftist wackos.

The problem here isn't that Stossel investigates an issue, gathers facts, comes to a conclusion and then presents his opinions in an on-air report. The problem is that he and his colleagues start with an ideological position and then find — or, in the case of the unconscionable organic-food reports, invent — material to support it.

The real question is when the real journalists at ABC News will get fed up enough to demand an end to this circus.