Consumer retort: from fake wrestling to overlawyered.com.

• Author: Mencimer, Stephanie
• Position: Book Review

Back in the 1970s, John Stossel was a young, enterprising reporter who specialized in exposing consumer rips-offs and stammers who preyed on housewives and the unemployed, His reporting earned him a pile of Emmys and a George Polk award. By the mid-1990s, though, after landing a choice slot on ABC's news show "20/20," he was earning the scorn of such liberal luminaries as Ralph Nader for his move away from traditional consumer reporting into the realm of government bashing and cheerleading for corporate America. Give Me a Break purports to answer the question: What happened to Stossel?

The story begins with Stossel's days as a local TV reporter with a stutter who conquered his speech impediment and worked his way up the ranks by pioneering the confrontational on-camera interview a la Geraldo Rivera. After years of taking down small-fry scam artists, the kind who tended to hurt mostly small-fry citizens, Stossel had an epiphany. He decided that he'd been chasing the wrong bad grays. "The more reporting I did, the more it dawned on me that government is often the problem rather than the solution," he writes. "Free markets, not coercive governments, are the consumer's best friend. The people who are really ripping us off are the lawyers, the politicians, and the regulators."

To illustrate his points, Stossel mixes in his biography with a recap of most of the stories he's done on TV over the years. Taken together, his book is a predictable catalog of all the usual conservative hobbyhorses. Global warming as fiction? Check. The Occupational Safety and Heath Administration and those pesky ergonomic regulations? See page 66. And of course, no conservative diatribe on the shelves today would be complete without the rant against taxes,

Nearly every topic Stossel tackles takes a viewpoint that has been assiduously packaged and promoted to reporters by the dozens of industry-funded think tanks that do nothing but create media-friendly narratives to highlight ridiculous regulation or to illustrate the uselessness of, say, the U.S. Department of Labor. Perhaps the TV audience that keeps Stossel on the air will find all of this as refreshing as Stossel claims they do in his fan mail. But political junkies will find much of his material far too familiar.

Take Stossel's "Taxed from morning to night" segment, in which Stossel tallies up all the taxes that construction worker Bill Thurston pays in an average day. He starts with a tax on the electricity that runs Thurston's alarm clock, the sales tax on his toothpaste, the sewer fee for his water, etc. until he gets to the "sin tax" on the beer he drinks at night. Granted, it's a pretty clever illustration. But Beltway insiders will recognize it as a spiel that GOP pollster Frank Luntz says he has been teaching to Republican members of Congress for at least a decade as a way of relating their anti-tax message to voters.

In addressing his many critics, Stossel insists that he's not a corporate shill but a "contrarian" who has been pilloried for challenging liberal anti-business orthodoxy. But his argument...