I used to respect John Stossel. He is one one of the few voices skeptical of paranormal phenomena that has broken through in the mainstream media. Yet, his reports have increasingly turned into screeds for his libertarian political philosophies. He has taken to using spurious arguments, ignoring important facets of issues and distorting the truth on such a regular basis that he succeeds in pissing me off even when I agree with the general gist of his story.
On Friday night, Stossel infected an entire hour of ABC’s airspace with the program John Stossel Takes on Myths, Lies and Nasty Behavior. I was jogging when the program came on (I think much of it was preempted for a basketball game in my market anyway) so I only saw the numbers one and two “myths” of the program. In these two “myths,” Stossel manages to create quite a few of his own myths.
A synopsis of the program can found here
His number two myth was that urban sprawl is bad.
First he creates straw-men critics of sprawl by saying
He provides no critics of sprawl who actualy say this. Then he tears up his staw-men by saying
Okay, first the loss of “open spaces” is way, way down the line of the list of problems created by urban sprawl. Second, the report showed several views of farmland shot from above when he describes how “undeveloped” America is. This brings us to…
Stossel Created Myth Number 1: Farmland is undeveloped.
Farms are man-made monocultures, cleared of preexisting natural conditions and doused in herbicides, fertilizers and whatnot. I’m not saying farms are evil, but to refer to them as “undeveloped” is disingenuous.
He went on to trash the city of Portland, OR which is under the boot of a tyrannical “central bureaucracy” that “approves all new development.” He accuses this policy of causing property values to go up in Portland, which raises…
Stossel created myth number 2: Rising property values are bad.
In reality, the opposite is true. When property values start to fall, a neighborhood is in serious jeopardy.
Stossel never offers any defense against other arguments against urban sprawl such as it causes environmental degradation, it increases America’s dependance on imported oil, it discourages healthy lifestyles in people who live there, it cost taxpayers a fortune to build more and more highways into increasing far-flung areas and so on.
After his treatise in favor of urban sprawl we get to the number one myth in (what? America? the world? I don’t know) - sharing is bad.
This report is basically an extrapolation of the Tragedy of the Commons. This is well accepted and isn’t all that controversial. A more accurate title would have been “Communal Property is Bad,” but that wouldn’t have been nearly as dramatic as “Sharing is Bad,” so there you go.
In the story, Stossel manages to go way beyond the Tragedy of the Commons, hoever, and turns his contention into a joke.
He builds the idea into an argument that all public property is bad. He shows footage of public parks strewn with used tires and mounds of garbage. The public parks where I live are absolutely beautiful. None of these were in the story. Stossel went out and found the worst places in America and presented them as if they were typical. Furthermore, he claims that private property is rarely dumped on. Really? That sounds like another myth to me. Do jackasses with trucks full of crap care who owns the land? I would think they just look for anyplace that’s deserted and let loose.
He shows the mini-fridge in his area at work which is a mess. This works as an example of an abused commons, but Stossel’s contention is that privately owned property is good. The fridge is privately owned. Stossel also had said that sharing amongst small groups is good. That is also the case with his fridge. The fridge shoots down two of his own assertions.
Then Stossel blames forest fires on public property.
Stossel created myth number 3: Forest fires are bad.
In reality, fires are part of the natural cycle and are vital to the health of the forest.
Timber companies saw down old growth forests. Hooray for that, I guess.
Then he talks about how the seas are overfished. He praises the government of New Zealand because…
Fine. But this is pretty much that same exact thing that Portland did in his myth number two. Why doesn’t Stossel chastise the New Zealander “central bureaucrats?” Didn’t this policy make fish prices rise in the same way the property values rose in Portland? If fewer fish are being taken, it follows that the supply of fish on the market would fall. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but Stossel is trying to have it both ways.
Hey John, give me a break!
