Fame & Fortune: ABC's John Stossel Consumer crusader has '20/20' vision with finances By Jay MacDonald • Bankrate.com

For 25 years, corporate fat cats, pompous pontificators, fast-buck Freddies and compromised congressmen have come to dread these words: "John Stossel is on line one."

Since 1981, the consumer crusader with the straight-shooter mustache and just-try-me demeanor has won 19 Emmys, a fistful of National Press Club honors and the Peabody Award for exposing fraud, flimflam, pseudo-science and government chicanery on ABC's "20/20."

Stossel was a Princeton psychology grad looking for gainful employment when he signed on as a researcher with KGW-TV in Portland, Ore., in 1969. A self-described "angry young reporter," his no-quarter-given style of consumer affairs reporting caught the attention of WCBS-TV in New York City, which led to a slot as consumer editor in the early days of "Good Morning America."

Viewers love Stossel's no-bull style and anything-goes subject matter; recently he reported on latent lesbians and teens with Tourette's syndrome.

Over the years, Stossel's targets have changed dramatically. Today, he sees big government, not big business, as consumer enemy No. 1. A libertarian, Stossel has established a nonprofit organization to package his free-market TV specials for use in high school classrooms, leading some critics to question his objectivity.

Bring it on; Stossel can take it. In fact, his latest book, "Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel -- Why Everything You Know Is Wrong," runs roughshod over all you effete elitists and armchair crusaders out there.

Can John Stossel really save the world? It's Bankrate on line one ...

Bankrate: How has a quarter-century of consumer reporting changed your view of the world?

John Stossel: I think I was always trying to be pro-consumer, but I wised up and figured out that business serves the consumer better than government does.

Bankrate: Although most viewers would tend to think of you as a raging liberal, you're in fact something quite different, a libertarian.

Stossel: I am now. I think I was a liberal, raging or not. All young reporters are.

Bankrate: Midway through your career, you stopped fingering the flimflam man and started placing the blame on ineffective government agencies. When did your ideology turn the corner?

Stossel: In my "Give Me a Break" book, there's a chapter called "Epiphany," and it's kind of deceptive because that suggests it was quick, but it was slow. I just watched the regulatory state fail; the people selling the breast enlargers and burn-fat-while-you-sleep pills kept getting away with it no matter what government did, but government just kept getting bigger and passing more rules --supposedly to protect consumers -- but that just seemed to enrich lawyers and make life more complex.

Bankrate: You even go so far as to support the left wing's favorite whipping boy, Halliburton, as an example of government fiscal responsibility.

Stossel: Well, support might be too strong a word, but I do say that if everything they say is true and they're stealing money and giving it to Dick Cheney on the sly, they are still giving better service than government manages to do. And the General Accounting Office agrees that they (Halliburton) do the work with three people that it takes government 10 to do.

Bankrate: Is it surprising to you that, 25 years later, you tend to be far more pro-business and less kind to government?

Stossel: Without question, I think government is the problem now. It's the myth that I'm trying to debunk in the "Myth" book; government does more harm than business. Business sometimes does harm, but the Enrons of life are an exception, and a $10 trillion economy is going to have some Enrons. But it's not that government even caught Enron, it was the market as usual; the stock fell and analysts couldn't get the data they thought they should get, and only then did the scandal come out. Nobody's laughing all the way to the bank; they're being prosecuted. Compare that to when the government messes up; when the Bureau of Indian Affairs can't find billions of dollars of the Indians' money, no one's fired, no one is even reprimanded, they just go back to Congress and ask for more money, and we give it to them.