Palmer R. Chitester Fund

Erie, PA 16506

The Palmer R. Chitester Fund was created by the combative Bob Chitester, with startup money from the Bradley Foundation, to create right wing "popular" media, and lately has taken to selling educational materials based on the error-prone reporting of ABC TV's arch-conservative correspondent John Stossel. It's Idea Channel distributes "intellectual" videotapes on conversations between mostly members of the right wing movement on topics ranging from political science to economics to history.

A recent (3/2000) story on Salon revealed the following about the fund's relationship to John Stossel & ABC News:

Stossel, the Chitester Fund, and ABC News affiliated with two conservative professors from George Mason University, another heavily funded educational institution, to create the so-called "Stossel in the Classroom" series of study aids to accompany the professor's study guides.
The guides are sold to more than 200 public and private schools across the country, who pay about $300 for the series.
The package is developed, packaged and sold to look like an ABC News product, with the network's logo and Stossel's face on the packaging, even though, according to the report, neither Stossel nor ABC News had anything to do with the study guides, except to provide Stossel's ABC News special reports.
Chitester board member and George Mason University professor [Walter] Williams is also a major on-air presence in two of the three Stossel specials sold by the organization, but he is only identified as an economist...Williams [also] supervises the work of Thomas Rustici and Alan Koczela, the economics instructors who wrote the classroom materials for "Stossel in the Classroom" at George Mason.
The connections between Chitester, Stossel and ABC News are deep...Stossel is a financial contributor to Chistester...a vice president at ABC News admits that he helped edit one of the study guides. Chitester is the owner of stossel.org, johnstossel.com, and johnstossel.org... ABC News gets a cut on all sales of Chitester's sales of the series.
One of the contributors to "Stossel in the Classroom" is none other than the Olin Foundation.
"Stossel in the Classroom" is advertised in places like School Reform News, the publication of the conservative Heartland Institute (publisher of the magazine "Intellectual Ammunition.")
"'Stossel in the Classroom' crosses the line between edgy journalism and pure propaganda."
"Many, if not most, of the 35 to 40 footnotes accompanying each guide cite predictably conservative sources like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Young Americas Foundation and the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages. They're not exactly the sources a skeptical reader would find convincing."
"The Palmer R. Chitester Fund is a conservative foundation, sporting John Fund of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and [Walter] Williams among others on its boards. Text on the Chitester Fund Web site describes the organization's mission:

"We are particularly interested in illuminating the prerequisites of a free society -- (with an) emphasis on projects that examine the role of government and explain the interrelationship of economic, personal and political freedom," code for a closeted conservative group."

Maybe the most interesting part of the story revealed a little about the founder and president of the fund, Bob Chitester. According to the reporter, David Mastio, who writes for, among others, the Weekly Standard and Reason,

"Chitester is a combative interview subject, starting each answer with 'You're a liar!' or 'That's not true, you're making it up.' Any questions about the ethics of this deal are 'just made up,' too. he said."

In the end, it may not be ethics that determines the fate of "Stossel in the Classroom." The program has apparently been unpopular with instructors. Chitester said that the student guides are being rewritten in response to negative feedback from the teachers who were using them.

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FAIR's Stossel Watch page

John Stossel at SourceWatch.org

American Legislative Exchange Council
December 4, 2000

John Stossel wins ALEC's "Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism"

Stossel received a "journalism award" from the movement-subsidized American Legislative Exchange Council

Also see:

American Legislative Exchange Council

Read the full report >

Ted Rose
Brill's Content
February 29, 2000

Laissez-Faire TV

ABC's John Stossel is a man on a mission: to teach Americans about the evils of government regulation and the rewards of free enterprise

"I think one John Stossel segment taking a skeptical look at government is worth a million dollars to the movement"

--Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy at the Cato Institute

Read the full report >

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