TV Personality John Stossel Opens Up About His Stutter

Transcript

Maya Chupkov:

When I first heard Jay Jordan speak about his criminal record and how it barred him from every single industry, I immediately went on LinkedIn, searched his name, and reached out to him. Jay responded almost right away, and he saw that I had a podcast about stuttering and told me he had a stutter too. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was the beginning of Proudstutter's first documentary film.

Jay Jordan's story intersects stuttering, family, faith, bullying, racism, incarceration, and life after getting out. How is it that stuttering is still mocked, stigmatized, and misunderstood? In a society where misconceptions about stuttering and stigmas around criminal records persist, Storytelling becomes a powerful tool to shift narratives and foster empathy.

We want to turn Jay’s Story into a short documentary film. With your help, we need to raise funds to complete the next phase of production. As part of a non profit, Proud Studder is responsible for all our own fundraising. Your support today will provide vital funds, which will help be used to reach our next milestone of production and bring our film to life.

Make a donation today at proudstutter. org/donate. Any amount will be greatly appreciated. I'm Maya Chupkov and I'm a woman who stutters. Welcome to Proud Stutter, a show about stuttering and embracing verbal diversity in an effort to change how we talk about it. One conversation at a time

Hello, hello, welcome back to proud stutter today's guest is super well known TV personality He's most known for being a co anchor on ABC's 2020 and a reporter on Good morning, America. He also did a stint on Fox News Any guess of who this might be? Well, um, it's John Stossel. He's a board member of the American Institute on Stuttering, so still very much involved in the Stuttering community.

In this episode of Proud Stutter, he opens up about the His stutter and how it impacted him early on in his broadcast journalism career. You'll notice in this episode, we're experimenting with more of a narrative form of podcasting, so it won't be your typical back and forth interview with myself and the guest. Um, this will be more of a, a narrative flow. So, you know, we're experimenting and expanding and. You know, most of the future episodes will be back to our interview style, but thought it would be fun to switch it up a bit. And so first here's John talking about how he felt about his stutter growing up.

John Stossel:

Uh, it was scary cause I, Was never, still am, never a stutter who's willing, like block in front of people because I was insecure and I just found that humiliating.

And, um, I, I was never a severe stutterer. They, they classified me as moderate in some therapy places.

Maya:

And when I asked John about how he got into broadcast journalism. He told me that he actually never intended to go into television news. He had no background in journalism, and cable news was rarely on his television screen. But in 1969, when Seattle Magazine offered him a job and he took it, only for the company to go under before his first day, which is how John winded up accepting a position at the Portland, Oregon TV station.

John:

I said, okay. And I was hiding my stutters. I was avoiding words I have trouble with and people wouldn't hear it. So they said, yeah, you should go on the air and report this yourself. And when I said, no, you don't want this. I'm a stutterer. They didn't know what I was talking about. And they pushed me and I covered some things. And then in the edit room, the, I would, let's say, have trouble. I would say box, box, box, and the editor would just cut out the stutter.

Maya:

John goes on to say how editing the stutter out worked for, for a while until the station asked him to do it live after some pushback and with a lot of fear. John agreed to do a live segment on campaign finances for the afternoon news. One of the most watched broadcasts and and here's how his his first newscast went

John:

I was blocking when the time ran out and they just cut me off the air and I was just horrified

Maya:

And the struggle with his stutter and and being a broadcast journalist, it didn't stop there. He ended up Moving to New York for a job. And the same type of thing happened where, you know, a non live segment, the editor would cut the stuttering out. But then when he would do a live interview, um, it was, it was really challenging for him. And so John did it. Decided that he wanted to make a change and really work on his fluency every day.

John:

I woke up feeling horrible, just dreading those 20 seconds. And that's when I got help from place called the Hollins communications reconstruction center, where they reteach us how to speak. And that really worked for me.

Maya:

So what exactly is the Hollins? Reconstruction Center. Well, here's John talking about the program and some of the odd parts about it.

John:

It was a three week program. It was so boring. They would put us in a room with a little computer that had a green light, and if you hit the sound too hard, the light turned red. And probably, if you look at our voices on an oscilloscope. We come across blockier. We hit the sounds a little harder than non stutterers do, and they were teaching us gentle onset to hit the sounds more gently, and that can help many stutterers. And as part of doing that, they slowed us down to two seconds per syllable. So we'd be in the room with a computer for 20 minutes, and then we'd sit together, maybe 12 of us, take a 20 minute break and supposed to talk in two seconds per syllable. That's really slow. This is about half a second per, oh, two seconds. You can imagine, we were like cows mooing at each other. About two weeks of that and then testing it in the real world. I found for the first time I could, instead of substituting a synonym, I could just go ahead and face the block. And because I had this good job, I wanted to keep it. I kept practicing. I would relapse and go back to practicing, and that would help me.

I still stutter sometimes. But this program, for someone who's really well motivated, Worked

Maya:

John got so excited about the results of the program that he actually went on his show 20/20 on ABC gushing about how there's a cure for stuttering and As you can imagine that didn't go quite so well

John:

With some of the viewers and while they help lots of people Others came up or wrote me and said didn't work for me And that was a shock. So then, since joining AIS, I, I see the argument from the people who say, not exactly go ahead and stutter, but stutter away when you can. Learn to, the more you hide it and avoid words, the more afraid of those words you become, and the more difficult it will be for you.

Maya:

That wasn't the only time John brought up stuttering on the TV screen. He actually had an interview with the head of GE general electric. And, and here's what he says about his interview with John Welch.

John:

I asked him, how, you, your stutter is bad. How could you run this company? And he said, I just don't give a shit. And that's, could be a good attitude if you could master that.

Maya:

He also mentioned a few well known actors who, who stutter.

John:

Bruce Willis, um, said he was a fan of my videos and then I was surprised to find out that he's a stutterer. Um, but James Earl Jones and. Him when they play another part and Emily Blunt, likewise, people are often fluent, uh, when we whisper or sing, we're fluent. So acting is different.

Maya:

Our conversation then took a bit of a tangent into acting and films around stuttering, and he mentioned the film, my cousin Vinny. I haven't seen that film yet, but here's what he thought about the movie.

John:

It's, it's funny. I'd seen the movie a bunch of times. And I, uh, I love the stuff with the actress, whose name I now forget. Um, but this was the side character. There's a trial and they get, uh, the heroes get a public defender and he's played by Austin Pendleton, who is a stutter and he plays, you know, a The bad lawyer and the stuttering gets in the way. So it's a terrible message for starters, like starters fail. And Pendleton is not happy that he played that part and said he wouldn't do it again.

Uh, if he could do it over again, um, what he does and what we used in our videos, he illustrates other ticks well, or avoidance mechanism and. I saw this when I was a kid, I went to the University of Michigan speech camp, Shady Trails, where they had stutterers, deaf kids, people with cleft palates, people with cerebral palsy, all these speech problems, and I could see some of the stutterers who discovered that an abstraction will work, like if I block them.

As I do now sometimes on the word video, I would go video and it would come out as part of the distraction. And that's great, a solution. And then it becomes automatic. So then they have to do more. And so then you see people who are doing all kinds of things to distract themselves from a block because over time that stops working.

And my cousin Vinnie, Austin Pendleton illustrated that

Maya:

I asked John Um, if like, what was one of the most shocking things he's learned about stuttering um, you know, since growing up with a stutter and over the course of his career talking to people. And I thought this story was super interesting.

John:

I was once invited to speak at the association of speech pathologists, the people who teach kids in school and give private lessons.

There were 20, 000 people there. And again and again, people told me, you know, we're great with this and that problem, but when we have the least success with is stuttering.

Maya:

I thought that was super interesting. And I had never heard that before. Um, but I do. I do want to attend that conference in the future and, you know, want to learn more about this, like, speech therapist experience with, with stuttering.

I think that's a really important conversation to have. The last theme that we talked about was, You know, finding comfort with stuttering and, you know, how to take the pressure off and ways to manage your, your stutter. And here's what John said about that.

John:

If you're in an environment where it's okay to stutter, like therapy.

Takes the pressure off and you're more likely to be fluent and with your friends, the pressure's on as a high school student or middle school student. I mean, I noticed that like I played beach volleyball and I'm old. And so a lot of the stronger, younger players are not all that happy about. Playing with me.

I'm not one of the cool kids, and I'm very aware. I am more likely to stutter in that situation about who has next game because the pressure is on. But again, it seemed to make more of an impression for me than other people who weren't so upset by it. So I think you've got the right idea doing a podcast and stuttering away.

Maya:

I had such a great time talking to John about his career and. Just living with his stutter and how, um, the view of a stutter has evolved and being part of AIS, um, yeah, it's, it was really cool to be able to interview such a, um, well known figure. Like my parents definitely recognize that the name and yeah, um, So that's, that's it for today's episode.

Thanks for listening. I know we did things a little differently for this episode. I'm experimenting with, um, the narrative form of podcasting. So I hope you liked this episode and I will see you next time. That's

it for this episode of proud stutter. This episode of proud stutter was produced and edited by me. Maya Chupkov. Our music was composed by Augusto Diniz and our artwork by Mara Ezekiel and Noah Chupkov. If you have an idea or want to be part of a future episode, visit us at www. proudstutter. com. And if you like the show, you can leave us a review wherever you are listening to this podcast.

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