Lou Dobbs, The Poster Boy For C”N”N

Posted by on . 3 comments.

(1)
David Leonhardt in the NYT:

Mr. Dobbs is fond of darkly hinting that this country is under attack. He suggested last week that the new immigration bill in Congress could be the first step toward a new nation — a “North American union” — that combines the United States, Canada and Mexico.

That’s the beauty of the word “could”.

Lou Dobbs could be out of his effing mind.

Lou Dobbs could be playing with himself under the desk the entire time he’s on the air, his inner mind focused on the nine-year old immigrant boy he molested the previous night.

You get the drift? Anyone can play. It’s a perfectly harmless game.

(2)
Still David Leonhardt:

The most common complaint about him, at least from other journalists, is that his program combines factual reporting with editorializing. But I think this misses the point. Americans, as a rule, are smart enough to handle a program that mixes opinion and facts. The problem with Mr. Dobbs is that he mixes opinion and untruths. He is the heir to the nativist tradition that has long used fiction and conspiracy theories as a weapon against the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Jews and, now, the Mexicans.

Sounds exactly right. He’s a hypocritical racist bigoted liar. And that’s on one of his good days.

That, of course, is an opinion. Maybe it’s also the truth?

(3)
The Cable “News” Network has never issued a correction about Dobb’s leprosy falsehoods.

Why would they? Dobbs’ ratings have “grown 72 percent since 2003″.

Once the mighty dollar hath spoken, further C”N”N sayeth not.

News organizations care about accuracy and credibility. “News” organizations care about ratings, and put people like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck on the air.

(4)
At least in the case of Lou Dobbs, it’s easy to see why C”N”N wants to keep him on. What’s their excuse for inflicting Glenn Beck upon the American public?

Glenn Beck’s ratings for the week of May 21-25 were staggering in how low Beck’s ratings have fallen. … In Beck’s 7pm time slot, he lost every single day (except Tuesday, which seems to be an abberation) to all 3 of the other cable news shows …

In fact, Glenn Beck’s numbers for this week were LOWER then a year ago when he was just starting. A year’s worth of programming, advertising, and everything else that CNN and Headline News has done to push Glenn Beck has not made a bit of difference.

Beck’s numbers are the lowest in cable news, and he shows no signs of improving any time soon.

One can only imagine that, for strategic reasons, C”N”N wants to maintain a presence in the racist, sexist, and homophobic segment of the “news” market. Presumably they consider this to be a fast-growing segment.

Comments

  1. Gregory R. Williams says:
    June 14, 2007 at 11:22 am

    Pat Buchanan has backed up the leprosy numbers, and other disease numbers, and claims he has it all sourced in his book “State of Emergency”.
    The New York Times is on of his sources on disease.
    Lou Dobbs says that David Leonhardt has his facts wrong, and here is Lou’s reply to him and other critics.
    From CNN

    Dobbs: An answer for my critics
    By Lou Dobbs
    CNN
    Editor’s note: Lou Dobbs’ commentary appears weekly on CNN.com. This commentary was first broadcast on “Lou Dobbs Tonight”

    NEW YORK (CNN) — I’ve been, over the years, because of our reporting on controversial issues and my strongly held beliefs on those issues, attacked, and usually pretty vigorously, by both the left wing and the right wing of this nation’s media, both mainstream and otherwise, and of course the politicians that form the extremes of our political spectrum.

    As a matter of fact, I’m regularly attacked by the right wing — the biggest business lobbyists in the country, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Bush administration — for my criticism of so-called free trade policies and outsourcing.

    I’m regularly attacked by the left wing as well — the Southern Poverty Law Center, The New York Times, The Nation, MALDEF and MEChA — for my opposition to illegal immigration.

    Today, The New York Times published a column that picks up where an advertisement — a paid advertisement in The Times, paid for by the Southern Poverty Law Center — left off two weeks ago.

    Today’s New York Times column is primarily a personal attack on me, focusing on an ad-lib on the set of this broadcast uttered more than two years ago by Christine Romans on the number of cases of leprosy in this country — an unscripted ad-lib, not a report by the way. We’d never done a report on leprosy until we had to set this record straight a couple of weeks ago. That’s over four and a half years of reporting on that issue.

    The second issue, accusing us of overstating the number of non-citizens in our federal prisons. That number reported on this broadcast three-and-a-half years ago.

    Now, no one hates making a mistake, I assure you, more than I do. And on this broadcast, we do make mistakes — not often, mind you — but certainly enough to frustrate me mightily, and with barely tolerable frequency.

    But today’s scurrilous personal attack from The New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, carrying the water of the Southern Poverty Law Center, also has the facts wrong.

    He wrote that I said that “One third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants.” That isn’t what I said. I didn’t say anything close to it.

    We reported that one-third of the federal prison population three and a half years ago were “non-citizens.” The columnist said the number was 6 percent. The exact number of the year in question was 29.3 percent for fiscal year 2001. And by the way, we’re putting up links on our Web site, loudobbs.com, so you can check the numbers for yourself.

    I introduced that report three and a half years ago by saying the number of illegal immigrants in our prisons was increasing and the financial burden rising. Well, we had to go back and check, and because our correspondent no longer has his notes to support that statement, that the number of illegal immigrants within a prison population of non-citizens, I have to retract it here tonight, and I apologize to you for the necessity of doing so. But like I said, I do make mistakes.

    Let’s look at a few other issues, however, raised by The New York Times, including that columnist’s statement that none of the enemies of the middle class, he said I said, “play a bigger role than illegal immigrants.”

    Well, again, that’s just not true. I’ve made perfectly clear over the years that corporate power, expressed by lobbyists spending billions of dollars each year in Washington to influence both political parties and public policy, represents the greatest single threat to this nation’s middle class.

    That columnist also said I gave air time to white supremacists, and mentions one by name: Madeleine Cosman, who wrote the article that Christine Romans used as a source for her later leprosy statement.

    The fact is, I made a mistake, and I’ve said we would never have used her as a source if we had known of her controversial background two years ago, at the time of the offending ad-lib. But the columnist fails to note that his own paper wrote a glowing obituary of Madeleine Cosman when she died last year.

    And the columnist writes that I suggested that new immigration reform bill would be the first step to a North American union. Nope. What I did say is that the proposed legislation, favored by President Bush and Senator Kennedy and others who are misguided, contains language in Section 413 that, if approved by Congress, would endorse and legitimize the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, which is the foundation of this administration’s efforts to create a North American union, and which would further threaten, in my opinion, our national sovereignty.

    Well, as I said tonight at the outset, I don’t like personal attacks from both the left and the right wings, but I’m getting kind of used to it. I will assure you that we’ll continue to report on the nonpartisan independent reality that is too often overwhelmed by the ideologues in our national media, the left wing and the right wing.

    And I’ll guarantee you this: Those attacks from the left and the right will continue. They perhaps may get even a little more energetic. And as long as they continue to do so, you and I can rest assured that we’re doing more right than wrong on this broadcast.

    Find this article at:
    http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/29/Dobbs.May30/index.html

    © 2007 Cable News Network.

  2. matt says:
    June 14, 2007 at 11:23 am

    And I’ll guarantee you this: Those attacks from the left and the right will continue. They perhaps may get even a little more energetic. And as long as they continue to do so, you and I can rest assured that we’re doing more right than wrong on this broadcast.

    “my logic is undeniable.”

  3. sarabeth says:
    June 14, 2007 at 12:02 pm

    Admirable how he never once addresses the central charge against him: that his program flat out misrepresented the number of new leprosy cases in the U.S. between 2001 and 2004, and refused to acknowledge the error or admit the facts even when challenged with the relevant government reports.

    And let’s not get into the xenophobic smear involved in false attributing this non-existent increase in leprosy to illegal immigrants (without any basis whatsoever).

    The man is quite simply a charlatan.

    People who buy into his shit are seriously sick.