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ohn Stossel, co-anchor of
TV's 20/20 newsmagazine
since May,
likes to
think of his seg-
ments as "jungle
gyms for the brain."
He wants to make
people approach old
ideas in new ways.
Stossel, who has
reported on a range
of topics from fears
to pop culture since
joining the show in
1981, will be leading
some of those mind
exercises when he
addresses the Greater
Detroit Chapter of
John Stossel
Hadassah at 1 p.m.
Tuesday, Sept. 16, at
Southfield's
Congregation
Shaarey Zedek.
The program, co-chaired by Nancy
Finkel and Sherrie Stern, also
includes lunch and boutique sales.
"I'm going to talk about what I've
learned as a reporter — how I woke
up to the fact that I was covering the
wrong things," Stossel told the
Detroit Jewish News. "I was a con-
sumer reporter criticizing business,
and I gradually learned that the peo-
ple really ripping us off were govern-
ment [officials] and lawyers."
Stossel, 55, the winner of 19
Emmy Awards, also will talk about
his ties to Judaism. Raised as a
Protestant by German-born parents
who came to the U.S. in the early
1930s, he didn't find out about their
Jewish religious background until
adolescence.
He married into an observant
Jewish family and is raising his chil-
dren as Jews. Stossel's brother-in-law

is Michael Steinhardt, chairman of
Jewish Renaissance Media, which
publishes The Jewish News.
Stossel, who had been a consumer
reporter in New York City before
becoming consumer
editor at Good Morning
America and then mov-
ing on to 20/20, gave
himself a break from
pending television
assignments to answer
some questions about
his experiences and
outlook:

JN: What altered
your thinking about
consumer reporting?
JS: The main change
was realizing, when I
became a network
reporter rather than
just a New York City
reporter, how difficult
it was to find truly
nationwide scams.
There were rip-offs, but they were
pretty small.
I came to realize that to make a lot
of money, businesses had to give cus-
tomers what they want and serve
them well.
Government, by contrast, when it
has a program that fails, never goes
out of business. It just asks Congress
for more money to accomplish its
mission, and Congress usually gives
it.

JN: What's the general 20/20
process for deciding on a story and
then following through with it?
JS: Either I, one of my bosses or a
producer comes up with an idea, and
we research it. If we still think it's a
good idea, we go out with a camera
crew and shoot about 10 or 20 times
as much videotape as we'll have time
for on the air.
We cut it down to the size that