New York City
There is too much absurdity in the article you published about me in your Big Media issue to respond to all of it, but I’d like to set the record straight on some of the more egregious misquotes and inaccuracies [Mark Dowie, “A Teflon Correspondent,” Jan. 7/14].
§ Steve Wilson did not make an “alarmed” call to my colleague Arnold Diaz, and Diaz did not say what you quote him–secondhand–as having said to Wilson.
§ Lowell Bergman was not my first producer, and had he been, he could not have kept me out of an editing room.
§ My lecture fees rarely go to the Palmer R. Chitester Fund; most go to Central Park Conservancy.
§ I earn no income from sales of my videotapes; that goes to ABC.
§ I have never said “regulation of business makes no sense whatsoever”–in fact, I praise basic environmental regulation.
§ Above all, I do not report on the benefits of free markets because I like “making real money,” as Dowie simplistically speculates; I report on them because freedom has lifted more people out of poverty than government dictates ever will.
Maybe it’s my fault Dowie got so much wrong, because I wouldn’t cooperate with him; after reading his hatchet job on Gina Kolata, I feared he wouldn’t be fair to me. He wasn’t.
I won’t say “cancel my subscription,” because I treasure what The Nation publishes on corporate welfare and “nation building.” I just hope, for the sake of your readers, that those articles are more accurate than what you published about me.
JOHN STOSSEL New York City?
I was more than a little disturbed to see myself quoted as criticizing my longtime friend and colleague John Stossel in Mark Dowie’s article. To begin with, no one from your publication ever called me to verify the quote, which Dowie got secondhand from Steve Wilson. Second, I cannot recall ever saying those things to Wilson. Third, I do not believe them to be true.
John Stossel and I have been best friends for more than twenty-five years. I respect and admire his work. Even when I disagree with him journalistically, I find him well informed and able to defend his point of view. He is an intelligent reporter who refuses to fall into predictable patterns of thinking and responding. His is a much-needed contribution to the news product.
Your depiction of him as a man motivated by money could not be more off the mark. He is, first and foremost, a person of principle. If his work has attracted enough of a following to justify a larger than average salary, more power to him.
ARNOLD DIAZ Churchville, Va.
Mark Dowie’s story about John Stossel’s organic food critique [“Food Fight,” Jan. 7/14] contained two serious factual errors and one misleading statement. First, at no time in the 20/20 segment did I make statements regarding the presence of pesticide residues on any foodstuffs tested by ABC News. Considering that this statement was the main point of contention and the subject of Stossel’s subsequent correction, attributing such statements to me seriously and erroneously impugns my reputation.
Second, Dowie wrongly attributes to me statements that organic food is no more nutritious than conventional food and calls it “an unproven claim.” Again, I made no such statements. It is ironic that significant errors such as these were committed in an article focused on journalistic accuracy. It was actually the spokesperson for the Organic Trade Association who twice told Stossel that organic food was only “as nutritious as any other product on the market.” British authorities recently ordered the organic industry to stop claiming nutritional superiority because they have not documented it.
Tufts University nutritionist Dr. William Lockeretz, co-founder of the pro-organic American Journal of Alternative Agriculture, told an international organic conference in 1997, “I wish I could tell you that there is a clear, consistent nutritional difference between organic and conventional foods. Even better, I wish I could tell you that the difference is in favor of organic. Unfortunately, though, from my reading of the scientific literature, I do not believe such a claim can be responsibly made.”
Finally, Dowie points out that the Hudson Institute gets donations from agribusiness corporations, which is true. He might also have pointed out another fact he was made aware of: For ten of the twelve years I have been a Hudson scholar, I have taken no salary from Hudson, including the period when I did the Stossel interview. (I have a full federal retirement.)
DENNIS T. AVERY, director
Point Reyes Station, Calif.
John Stossel says it himself. Had he cooperated I would have known and reported that he had switched laundromats from Chitester to Central Park Conservancy and that Lowell Bergman was not his first producer (as if that matters). I had only Bergman to rely on for that item. And had ABC’s imperious media flack, Jeffrey Schneider, permitted Arnold Diaz to take an interview, I would have learned, as Diaz told me after publication of my article, that he is “a very close friend of John’s and admires his work.” And if he had read the article carefully, Stossel would know I never said or implied that he made a cent on Stossel in the Classroom videotapes.
As for the “real money” question, those are not my words. Curious about why my subject mutated rather rapidly from a dedicated consumer reporter to a procorporate spaniel, adding at least one digit to his income in the process, I could only rely on the firsthand account of his former colleague, Steve Wilson, who recalls Stossel telling him: “I got a little older, liked the idea of making real money, so started looking at things a little differently.” Neither Stossel nor Wilson contests the accuracy of that quote.
To Arnold Diaz, my apologies for the unprofessional secondhand quote. I assumed you would be called for verification or that Jeff Schneider would relent and allow me to speak with you.
By claiming that his reputation was “impugned” by the fact that he didn’t say on camera that pesticide residues had not been found on food, is Dennis Avery announcing a change of heart on the subject? This will be welcome news to the Organic Trade Association.
And I didn’t say that Avery drew a salary from the Hudson Institute. I said that the Center for Global Food Issues, for which he speaks, is a project of the institute, which it is.
MARK DOWIE
Columbus, Ohio
Oh, how I love a Gore Vidal sarcasm attack! Where was it that a frothing William Buckley offered to hit Gore? Nobody does it better than Vidal [“Times Cries Eke! Buries Al Gore,” Dec 17, 2001].
DICK WALTMIRE
Cambridge, Mass.
Eke! Why did Gore Vidal leave out the juiciest passage of all in his biting commentary on the New York Times‘s inept reporting of the Florida recount? Just a bit further on (after they’ve lost all but the most indefatigable readers), Fessenden and Broder finally admit, “If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin…. Using the most restrictive standard–the fully punched ballot card–5,252 new votes would have been added to the Florida total, producing a net gain of 652 votes for Mr. Gore, and a 115-vote victory margin. All the other combinations likewise produced additional votes for Mr. Gore, giving him a slight margin over Mr. Bush, when at least two of the three coders agreed.” Technospeak for “Gore won.” Period.
KAREN HARRIS
Atlanta
Gore Vidal mentions his dismay that the hijacked election and the first appointment of a President by the Supreme Court hasn’t generated the furious reaction it deserves. Well, I’m furious but don’t have a clue about how to make it known. Letters to the editor of my local newspaper (the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) are heavily censored in favor of the war. My legislators in Georgia who are not Republican seem curiously muted–or are they censored also? The national media are so biased in favor of Republicans and the monster businesses that own them that I’ve given up watching the evening news and pick up the BBC and the London and Canadian newspapers on the Internet. How would Vidal suggest we make our displeasure known? We may be on our way to losing our democracy, as Germany did in the 1930s, and as our founding fathers continuously warned us was possible.
S. JEWELL
Port Townsend, Wash.
There are active lay shadow media that have been following the Florida and NORC cases intently since the moment Bush’s first cousin called the election for him on Fox TV. One hotbed of this activity is in the Florida-related threads of the “White House” TableTalk forum on www.salon.com, much of which has been archived for permanent reference. Another more recent hotbed is the “White House” forum on www.prospect.org. There was a great deal of on-the-ground reporting from TableTalk residents in Florida that never made it anywhere near the major media outlets, as well as continual detailed analysis from Paul Lukasiak and others. The consensus of evidence and speculation from these sources is that widespread grievous Republican vote fraud took place in Florida, accounting for a net surplus of many tens of thousands of unaccountable and uncounted actual “overvotes” for Gore and another candidate. If Vidal ever decides to write a book named 2000 as a companion volume to 1876, the record of this shadow media might prove a motherlode of source material.
STEPHEN SCHUMACHER
JUST ANOTHER HATCHET JOB?
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EKE-ING IN THE DARK…
