Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise

Ron Arnold

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The Center's media profile remains high because of our broad expertise on the issues and our ability to tell it like it is.

Reporters seek out the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise because they know they can trust us to be honest, to be authoritative, and to make even the most complicated ideas clear and compelling.

The Fox News report, Spotted Owls Endangered by Logging or Nature? is a good example of how the Center keeps its media profile high. Here's the inside story behind the story.

Fox News reporter Dan Springer sensed a news story when reports emerged that it was not loggers that were reducing the Northern Spotted Owl population in the Pacific Northwest, but the barred owl invading the spotted owl's territory.

This embarrassing discovery suggested that the timber wars of the 1980s had needlessly  destroyed the jobs of over 22,000 timber workers.

Dan got out his Rolodex and went to work. Among the key people he called was the Center's Ron Arnold (left), who Dan knew to have long experience in the issue.

Producer Robert Shaffer and camera operator Charles Stewart quickly set things up.

Like all good reporters, Dan does not give out interview questions in advance - just a basic outline of what the story is about. He counts on direct and probing enquiry to produce fresh and spontaneous comment.

Ron Arnold is known in the business as a "good interview," someone who can give thoughtful answers in short, snappy and even sassy sound bites.

A critic dubbed Ron "a master of the incendiary sound bite" after being scorched by one of them.

Dan Springer and his veteran news crew took a look at the Center's woodland setting in Bellevue, Washington, and decided to shoot outside.

With good reason: The Center's office sits amidst a dozen 80-foot Douglas fir trees that are carefully protected in their Liberty Park complex.

The Fox News story was shot right outside Ron's office door. And incidentally, Ron's home, less than a mile from his office, also sits among a dozen 80-foot Douglas fir trees on Wilburton Hill, a site that was totally clearcut by loggers in the early 20th century.

Photos by executive assistant Tiffany Lindsey.