But nothing is better than the market, where the customer and the business deal directly with each other, because if you rip people off, word gets out. That business eventually loses its customers, and the good ones that serve people well get the business. You get government in there, and it's just more money for the lawyers who write the bills.

Stossel was named co-anchor of 20/20 in May 2003 while he was writing his first book Gimme a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters Cheats and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media which was publiJohn Stosseld in 2004. Stossel and his former ABC News colleague Chris Cuomo are silent investors in Columbus Tavern a restaurant on Columbus Avenue at 72nd Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side. For example Stossel was criticized for a segment on his October 11 1999 show during which he argued that AIDS research has received too much funding "25 times more than on Parkinson's which kills more people.

In his decades as a reporter Stossel has received numerous honors and awards including 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. John F.