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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Give Us a Break By Peter Hart ABC News reporter John Stossel enjoys a special position in broadcast network news: Though not usually often identified as a commentator, Stossel is routinely allowed to use his one-hour primetime specials and his regular "Give Me A Break" features on 20/20 to explicitly promote his personal ideological agenda--from singing the virtues of corporate greed to attacking child labor laws--a perspective that is distinctly different from the generally muted centrism that pervades broadcast TV news. While there is a long and honorable tradition of U.S. journalists with definite points of view who hoped that their reporting would have a political impact--from Thomas Paine to Ida Tarbell to I.F. Stone--what distinguishes Stossel is his willingness to warp reality to fit his ideological preconceptions. His reports, notable for their one-sided sourcing and rejection of inconvenient facts, are frequently marred assertions from Stossel and his favored guests that are misleading or factually incorrect. Stossel's errors are often so obvious that one wonders how they could have ended up on the air. In a 20/20 report on medical research (10/11/99), Stossel complained that too much funding was going to AIDS research, claiming that spending on the disease was "25 times more than on Parkinson's, which kills more people." In fact, AIDS killed more than 16,000 people in the United States in 1999--down from 43,000 in 1995. Parkinson's, which is not itself generally fatal but contributes to other illnesses, has a mortality rate of 2 per 100,000 to less than 1 per 100,000, depending on the demographic group (BC Medical Journal, 4/01)--which works out to a death toll in the United States of less than 4,000 per year. To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1133 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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