Sure, John Stossel loves DDT and dwarf-tossing. And OK, he praised price-gouging after Hurricane Katrina and thinks the minimum wage should be cut to about two cents an hour. (If that leaves you short of rent money, don't worry: Stossel is crusading for your right to sell your own kidney.) But none of that means he didn't want to be loved. And now that he's left ABC for the Fox News family, he finally is.

``People are nicer to me here,'' Stossel muses. ``People like me here. I get much a better vibe.''

Stossel -- whose new Fox Business Network show Stossel debuts at 8 p.m. Thursday -- spent 28 years at ABC, rising from a break-of-dawn consumer reporter to co-anchor of the prime-time news magazine 20/20. He got to produce four specials a year with such pugnacious titles as Stupid In America and Are We Scaring Ourselves To Death? He won a wallful of broadcast journalism awards.

But Stossel says he was ``swimming upstream'' against politically hostile currents every inch of the way -- or at least, all the inches he traveled after deciding about two decades ago that Big Government and not Big Business was the biggest threat to American life, limb and liberty.

``I had a nice career there. It was a good gig,'' he says of ABC. ``But I had so many stories I wanted to do that they weren't interested in. I wanted to do much more on health care, all the potential problems with getting government more involved in health care. I wanted to do another show on school choice -- I had done one on schools called Stupid In America that did quite well, and I wanted to do a follow-up. But their attitude was, `You've already been there and done that.' Fox's attitude was, `We like that stuff. Do it for us.' ''

Negotiations between Fox News and Stossel began in the summer of 2008 after one of his stories on health care got bumped from 20/20. For months, ever since the Obama administration announced that health-care reform would be its top political priority, Stossel had been trying to get a skeptical piece on the air.

When the network wouldn't agree to a new story, he suggested rerunning his 2007 special Whose Body Is It, Anyway: Sick in America. That didn't fly, either. Finally Stossel persuaded ABC bosses to let him cut a single segment from the special down to a 20/20-size report to air two days after ABC hosted an Obama town-hall meeting on health-care reform. But the piece was bounced at the last moment for coverage of Michael Jackson's death.

``My contract was coming up for renewal, and the Fox News people had called me a couple of times in previous years,'' Stossel says. ``But in this case, I called [Fox News boss] Roger Ailes. `I have a window, and it's time,' I said. `Please, I want to come to Fox News.' '' Two months later, Stossel and ABC announced they were calling it quits. Of Stossel's account of their parting, an ABC spokeswoman says only: ``Just say that we wish him well.''

Like the epitaph of most love affairs, that tepid farewell scarcely reflects the passion that once existed. Stossel was once among ABC's hottest commodities. One of the first in-your-face TV consumer reporters, he delighted viewers and bosses with his confrontational interviews.

Other consumer reporters talked blandly about unsupportable claims by analgesic manufacturers; Stossel went on camera waving bottles of Anacin and Excedrin, ranting that ``the ads are hogwash.'' He asked a pro wrestler if the sport was fake and got punched in the face. His reports cost ABC millions of dollars in lost advertising and legal fees, but his star -- and ratings -- kept rising.

It all started to unravel when one of his bosses asked for a piece on the danger of exploding Bic lighters.

KILLER TOILETS

Stossel -- imagining interviewing some corporate stooge as severed arms and legs of dismembered smokers flew through the air around their heads -- was initially enthusiastic. Then he discovered there had been exactly four reports of exploding lighters in a year. ``Toilets kill four people a year,'' said Stossel, waving a stack of actuarial tables. ``Let's do a story on killer toilets.''

Things with ABC were never quite the same. Stossel's reporting increasingly focused on economic chaos wrought by government over-regulation. His questions ambushed not shifty-eyed con men running envelope-stuffing scams but nanny-state politicians and liberal do-gooders. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt ended one session on his department's land-use planning by snapping, ``I'm going to fire whoever scheduled this interview!'' Ted Turner, asked whether investing his money to create jobs wouldn't help more people than giving it to charity, shouted, ``This is why people don't like newsmen!'' as he threw his mike to the floor.''

Lots of viewers still loved it, but lots of Stossel's colleagues pointedly didn't.

``All the sudden, I had a `point of view,' '' he recalls, an edge of sarcasm creeping into his voice. ``The late Peter Jennings would look away when he saw me in the hall. He thought my libertarian point of view betrayed ABC's sacred objectivity.

``Listen, I had a point of view when I was bashing business and won 19 Emmys as a consumer reporter. None of my colleagues were bothered by that. It only became bothersome to people when I became a libertarian and began criticizing government. . . . Every TV reporter has a point of view. Did Edward R. Murrow have a point of view? When he was bashing Senator [Joseph] McCathy, which is what everybody loves him for, he certainly did.''

Sometimes, colleagues refused to work with Stossel -- two producers quit his first special, and ABC reporter Cyra McFadden wouldn't appear on 20/20. Others, he says, tried to keep his stories off the air. He skirmished endlessly with bosses over a report that argued that rent control, because it reduces the housing supply, is actually anti-consumer. The problem was an interview with free-market economist Walter Williams.

``He had a sound bite in there that went something like, `Nothing destroys a city faster than rent control; not even bombing,' '' Stossel recalls. ``Now, the downside of rent control is not very controversial among economists, not at all. But the piece kept coming back [for revision] from an ABC lawyer. Later I learned he lived in a rent-controlled building. Most leftists think rent control is a good thing. . . . That one is typical. When the culture is leftist, it affects things.''

Fox News culture certainly isn't leftist, though Stossel says it isn't conservative, either. ``They're more open to conservatives, and they certainly have some opinion/analysis shows that are conservative,'' he says. ``But all the producers and reporters, every show, the whole network, 24 hours a day? I just don't think you can argue that.''

NO CONSERVATIVE

In any event, Stossel is no conservative, either, despite what some of his critics believe. (The lefty website Salon.com once dismissed him as a ``right-wing apparatchik.'') A libertarian who's skeptical of virtually all government power, he's attacked any number of conservative causes, from the war on drugs to price supports for U.S. farmers.

``A lot of people seem to think I'm conservative, which is weird,'' he says. ``I think homosexuality is just fine. I wasn't for going into Iraq. I've advocated legalization of drugs and prostitution. But because I'm not a garden-variety, mainstream media type, they call me conservative.''

The difference should be apparent on the weekly Fox Business show that kicks off Thursday. You can expect such un-mainstream-media things as a celebration of Ayn Rand, the libertarian high priestess whose epochal novel Atlas Shrugged argued that all the world's talented people should go on strike until the mediocre masses and their government stooges agreed to leave them alone. Or a show arguing that the best thing we can do about global warming is to ignore it.

Oh, and Stossel's finally going to get his ideas about health-care on the air -- that we need not only less government but also less insurance.

``My perspective is that the only thing that works every time is the free market,'' Stossel says. ``And the only way that works is when customers and health-care providers deal directly with each other, without the government or the insurance industry acting as a screen. Look at Lasik surgery, which isn't covered by insurance. Prices have gone down, and quality has gone up. The waiting rooms are nice. And does your doctor give you his cell phone number? I bet not, but the Lasik doctors do, because it's a market, and to succeed they have to do what the customer wants. And yet the market is vilified all the time. Well, not on my show.''