ABC Frets as Stossel Plans His Own No-Spin Zone

John Stossel is eager for Barbara Walters' retirement so he can remake "20/20" into his "very own no-spin zone," the New York Observer noted today.

"She’s going to be around until September," Stossel said. "After that, I want to do the show by myself."

Naturally the execs at ABC, the network of Peter Jennings (described by Russ Smith of the New York Press as the "cocktail-circuit anchorman who’s barely less hostile to Bush than Sidney Blumenthal"), have other plans. One has already predicted an "ensemble cast" instead, even though Stossel has brought in big ratings.

As we reported last week, he has exposed his own colleagues at ABC as hypocrital left-wing elitists who vilify the capitalistic system that enriches them.

'Totalitarian Left'

"Stossel’s true love remains the contrarian 'who woulda figured?' investigation, predicated on the idea that the free market is a cure-all for social ills, and that government institutions and the 'totalitarian left,' as Mr. Stossel has called them – environmentalists, the liberal media and Upper West Side liberals ('where the New York Times writers live,' he said) – deserve a good drubbing," the Observer observed.

Stossel told the paper he wasn't following Bill O'Reilly's lead.

"That's wrong and unfair," he said. "I was certainly doing this before O'Reilly was on the air. I'm doing it because 25 years of reporting showed me that regulation repeatedly fails and wrecks lives."

And don't call him a conservative. He's a libertarian. He didn't want publisher HarperCollins to add that final phrase to the title of his new book, "Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media."

"I think it is misleading," he said. "I was annoyed at the subtitle, but I went along with it because the publisher knows how to sell books. ... It makes me seem conservative. And it insults them, too. I'm more liberal than them, because I'm libertarian."

He is pro-choice on such issues as drug abuse and flag burning. "The moral conservatives are highly offended by me," he said.

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