The media have seemed to have forgotten what has made this country prosperous according to ABC's John Stossel [1].

Stossel told an audience at the Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 4 [2] in New York that the media propagate an anti-capitalist sentiment.

"The socialist media - maybe they will just never get it," Stossel said. "Their world view is anti-capitalist. [Ludwig] von Mises wrote about it in 1972 and it's just very hard to change. I would also argue the scientific community is as well."

The ABC "20/20" host based that notion on his experience from being a consumer reporter. "[A]s I've done my consumer reporting, just to elaborate on that, I think what's fueling a lot of this is a general hatred of capitalism," Stossel said.

Stossel, author of Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel - Why Everything You Know is Wrong [3], said being a conservative in New York City was like being as unpopular as a child molester. He said he even encountered some hatred personally.

"[I]'m trying to figure out what's the hatred," Stossel said. "It's because I'm a consumer reporter defending business and people hate business. So, I'm trying to understand why do they hate business so much. I thought - some people have said ‘the envy of the wealth.' Some people want so much more and they figure it's a zero-sum game."

He tied this ill-will about business and capitalism to global warming by saying the alarmism fed off of this sentiment.

"In our intuitive understanding of this zero-sum game - you made a profit off of me and I must have lost," Stossel said. "That economic ignorance makes people hate business and I think this global warming movement feeds on it."