His journalist colleagues don’t like John Stossel, or so he says.

The Emmy award-winning anchorman for ABC’s news magazine “20/20 who is known for his anti-regulatory, libertarian politics told a book promotion lunch at the Harvard Club yesterday that things went downhill when he moved from consumer affairs reporting to attacking government regulations.

“Something odd happened when I began to criticize regulators. Suddenly, my colleagues didn’t like me any more.”

That’s not entirely true. But more on that later.

In fact, he said, they might even hate him.

“They call me a ‘conservative,'” he said, “and they say it with real hatred, with the same kind of sneer they use with ‘child molester.'”

This, he said, was despite the fact that he was against the war in Iraq, believes in legalized prostitution and drugs, and thinks homosexuality is natural – possibly bold remarks in front of a room full of members of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

He admitted that he probably didn’t help his popularity with his liberal colleagues by entitling his new book: “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”

And he might have passed up a shot at reconciliation yesterday when he mentioned that, in his opinion, his colleagues are “steeped like tea bags in the New York Times, and sycophantically copy from it.”

“Give Me a Break” outlines Mr. Stossel’s theory that regulations do more harm than good.

“The more I saw regulators work,” he writes in an early chapter, “the more it seemed that the real beneficiaries were entrenched businessmen, unions and the regulators themselves.”

But it was for his skewering of the press that he got the most smiles.

He said that when an announcement is made that a new drug – 15 years in the development – will save 14,000 lives a year, no reporter writes that if it took 15 years to develop, then “it killed 14,000 last year.”

“Reporters don’t think that way,” he said.

“How much government do we need?” he asked. “Reporters seldom ask that question.”

“We can see the failure,” he said. “We don’t know what freedom would save.”

Mr. Stossel did not disagree with Manhattan Senior Fellow Walter Olson, who said Mr. Stossel was “the only one in TV today” making such comments.

“I’m sad that other reporters don’t want to do stuff like this,” Mr. Stossel said. “Basically all reporters note the inequities of capitalism and see capitalism as cruel and unfair, and (think) that the country needs government to protect them.”