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Award-winning news correspondent and author John Stossel will deliver a speech on “Freedom and Its Enemies” at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 27, in Colton Chapel.
Free and open to the public, the talk is sponsored by Lafayette’s Gladstone T. Whitman ’49 Fund, which provides students with opportunities for full-time summer internships and participation in seminars and workshops at nonprofit institutions that study free markets and economic liberty. The fund also supports appearances by prominent speakers. For information, contact Don Chambers, the Walter E. Hanson/KPMG Peat Marwick Professor of Business and Finance, (610) 330-5303 or chambers@lafayette.edu.
Following his lecture, Stossel will sign copies of his latest book, Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel—Why Everything You Know is Wrong, published last year by Hyperion and scheduled for release in paperback in May.
The co-anchor and correspondent of ABC News 20/20, Stossel is also anchor and correspondent of The John Stossel Specials. He joined 20/20 in 1981 and began doing one-hour primetime specials in 1994. He was named co-anchor of 20/20 in May 2003.
The winner of 19 Emmy Awards, Stossel has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club and is the recipient of the George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting and George Foster Peabody Award, among other awards.
In addition to longer in-depth reports for 20/20 on subjects ranging from addiction to parenting issues in his “Family Fix” segments, Stossel is featured in a weekly segment entitled “Give Me a Break,” short commentaries that take a skeptical look at a wide array of issues, from pop culture controversies to censorship and government regulations.
Stossel’s specials tackle issues that face Americans today. They consistently rate among the top news programs and have earned him uncommon praise: “The most consistently thought-provoking TV reporter of our time” said the Dallas Morning News, while the Orlando Sentinel said he “has the gift for entertaining while saying something profound.”
Five of these specials have been adapted into Teaching Kits by In The Classroom Media (a nonprofit organization) in cooperation with ABC for use by high school teachers to help educate their students about economic freedom. The kits are now being used by more than 25,000 teachers in more than 35 percent of the schools in the United States, reaching more than 4.2 million students per year.
In his most recent special, Stossel questioned whether addiction is a disease or if people have a choice. He looked at overweight people, drug users, smokers, and gamblers, among others, as well as treatment options. In another recent special, Family Fix: Help! I’ve Got Kids, Stossel explored what to do with kids who disobey, parental favoritism, and different ways boys and girls communicate.
John Stossel Goes to Washington looked at how, under Democrats and Republicans, government keeps growing, while Tampering with Nature suggested that most tampering is a good thing. In Hype, Stossel explains that done right, hype can sell everything from newspapers to football players to a company’s stock.
Stossel’s first special, Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?, examined exaggerated fears of things like chemicals and crime. It was followed by The Blame Game, which looked at Americans’ growing tendency to blame their misfortunes on others, and Boys and Girls Are Different.
Stossel traveled the world to compare American life with life elsewhere and ask: Is America Number 1? In You Can’t Say That!, he looked at the battle between free speech and censorship. He looked at the mechanics of mating in Love, Lust, and Marriage, and at the science of happiness in The Mystery of Happiness. He examined bogus lawsuits in The Trouble With Lawyers, and bogus scientific claims in Junk Science: What You Know That May Not Be So.
Freeloaders focused on how getting “something for nothing” appeals to all of us, including rich people who use the power of government to help themselves. Greed challenged conventional wisdom on how Americans view business, while Sex, Drugs and Consenting Adults questioned why Americans are jailed for voluntarily participating in so-called consensual crimes.
In his early years at ABC, Stossel was consumer editor at Good Morning America. Prior to that he was a consumer reporter at WCBS-TV in New York City. He began his journalism career as a researcher for KGW-TV in Portland, Ore. Stossel is a 1969 graduate of Princeton University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in psychology.