clear about that, and I certainly can't speak for anybody besides myself.
That said, DOBBS' populism, like O'LOOFAH's, has been much discussed here. His interpretation of the immigration situation is well known and you'll be glad to know you have plenty of adherents here. My post was aimed at MY puzzlement at why GRACE-DOBBS-BECK appear to get as much leeway from their employers as they do despite (MY INTERPRETATION) their various screw-ups. The answer is that, in the universe of miniscule ratings, they do better (as shown in the original post) than somebody else.
Here are some oft posted links on DOBBS:
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/business/30leonhardt.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&ref=media&pagewanted=all&oref=sloginTruth, Fiction and Lou Dobbs
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: May 30, 2007
The whole controversy involving Lou Dobbs and leprosy started with a “60 Minutes” segment a few weeks ago.
... Over the last few years, Lou Dobbs has transformed himself into arguably this country’s foremost populist. It’s an odd role, given that
he spent the 1980s and ’90s buttering up chief executives on CNN, but he’s now playing it very successfully. He has become a voice for the real economic anxiety felt by many Americans. ....
For one thing, Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat
flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.
Second, Mr.
Dobbs really does give airtime to white supremacy sympathizers. Ms. Cosman, who is now deceased, was a lawyer and Renaissance studies scholar, never a medical doctor or a leprosy expert. She gave speeches in which she said that Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children. Back in their home villages, she would explain, rape was not as serious a crime as cow stealing. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a list of other such guests from “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”
Finally, 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. On other occasions, his program has described
a supposed Mexican plot to reclaim the Southwest. In one such report, one of his correspondents referred to a Utah visit by Vicente Fox, then Mexico’s president, as a “Mexican military incursion.”
When I asked Mr. Dobbs about this yesterday, he said, “You’ve raised this to a level that frankly I find offensive.”
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. ....
E-mail: Leonhardt@nytimes.com
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=589Broken Record
Lou Dobbs' daily 'Broken Borders' CNN segment has focused on immigration for years.
But there's one issue Dobbs just won't take on.
By Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok
.... For more than two years now, Dobbs has served up a populist approach to immigration on nightly segments of his newscast entitled "Broken Borders." He has relentlessly covered the issue, although hardly from a traditional news perspective -- Dobbs favors clamping down on illegal immigration, and his "reporting" never fails to make that clear. He has covered the same issues, and the same anti-immigration leaders, time after time after time. In recent months,
Dobbs has run countless upbeat reports on the "citizen border patrols" that have sprung up around the country since last April's Minuteman Project, a paramilitary effort to seal the Arizona border.
But there's one thing Lou Dobbs won't do. No matter what others report about the movement,
Dobbs has failed to present mounting and persistent
evidence of anti-Hispanic racism in anti-immigration groups and citizen border patrols. ....
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