Cal Thomas
July 5, 2001
John Stossel's Environmental Expose
While watching John Stossel's ABC News special, "Tampering With
Nature," I felt like a citizen of those not-so-long-ago "captive
nations" who learned the truth of what was going on not from their
own leaders and the controlled media, but from the Voice of America
and Radio Free Europe.
In one hour last Friday (JUNE 29), Stossel exposed the propaganda and
one-dimensional perspective about the environment and biotechnology
that has caused millions of schoolchildren to repeat the information
they've been spoon-fed in a way that would delight a teacher in a
communist classroom.
The special revealed another point of view that is rarely, if ever,
heard. The reason these views aren't heard is that most of the people
who bring you the news and who teach our children are of a singular
mindset and teach or broadcast only their ideas.
Patrick Moore, a former director of Greenpeace, was interviewed. He
said political activists have hijacked the environmentalist movement
and that they are "using environmental rhetoric to cloak agendas like
class warfare and anti-corporatism that, in fact, have almost nothing
to do with ecology."
Interest groups, Stossel said, pressure members of Congress into
voting for things that have little or no effect on the environment,
but which increase the influence and fund-raising capabilities of
such groups.
Even if greenhouse gases were restricted, Stossel says reliable
estimates show restrictions would prevent a rise in global
temperature by only a fraction of a degree. He wondered if such low
expectations are worth the potential high cost to taxpayers of
trillions of dollars and a radically altered lifestyle.
Biotechnology, which is helping to make food more plentiful, is
another target of environmentalists. Stossel showed that their
objections have been answered by the very science they decry.
Bovine growth hormone, for example, increases milk production in
cows, though environmentalists regularly condemn it as harmful to
human health. Stossel reported that the World Health Organization,
the Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association
have deemed the hormone completely safe.
The most controversial and disturbing moment came when Stossel
interviewed elementary schoolchildren in Santa Monica, Calif. Stossel
told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly that some individual interviews
had been cut by ABC after an environmentalist group contacted
and "brainwashed" parents into believing that Stossel was doing
an "editorial" that would be injurious to the environmental cause.
Stossel told O'Reilly he wanted to show how public schoolchildren
have been lied to about the environment. He said children believe the
one side they have been taught of the global-warming argument: that
Republican presidents are responsible for dirty air and water
(though, he noted, air and water are much cleaner now) and that
corporations are "evil."
Even with the interviews that remained in the program, Stossel
managed to prove his point. He asked the children what they had
learned, and then he quoted governmental and scientific sources to
prove the children and their teachers wrong.
He also interviewed activists about their knowledge of the earth,
food additives, genetic food engineering and other scientific
discoveries designed to improve human life.
"The extremists dominate the debate," Stossel told O'Reilly. Indeed
they do.
What else have students been taught and what else does the public
believe that is factually untrue? It might take years of TV specials
and a different education objective to cleanse our systems of the
intellectual and moral impurities we have been programmed to accept
as truth.
Stossel should be thanked and ABC News praised for allowing another
environmental point of view to be heard. The environmental lobby
controls almost all of the media, as do so many other liberal
perspectives. It is testimony to the power of truth that so many wish
to discredit and even silence John Stossel.
©2001 Tribune Media Services
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