I have stated here at DailyKos that Lou Dobbs is a racist. I have been flamed by many. I really don't care, because I know that truth is on my side and today I have even more proof thanks to the following article from "
The Nation".
In May, when thousands upon thousands took to the street to protest calls to arrest illegal immigrants. The talking heads of FOX were spewing what they always spew, but Dobbs took to a new level.
But on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, it was a different story. "Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and their supporters today failed in their attempt to shut down most of our cities to support amnesty for all illegal aliens," the network's 6 pm news anchor reported that evening. Dobbs elaborated in his online column: "It is no accident that they chose May 1 as their day of demonstration and boycott. It is the worldwide day of commemorative demonstrations by various socialist, communist and even anarchic organizations.... No matter which flag demonstrators and protesters carry today, their leadership is showing its true colors to all who will see."
To Dobbs, Hispanics import deadly diseases, crime, and terrorism. To my great grandfather who survived the Holocaust, his statement on Dobbs to be rings true - "I have heard this before."
Many of us have concerns about television pundits and what they saw, because the are seen by millions of Americans and people believe what they say. There is a reason that we have issues with Ann "Adam's Apple" Coulter, Bill "Loofa" O'Reilly. and Sean "Sucks Ass" Hannity. Because the hate and nonsense that they say makes some Americans believe it to be true. The same will Lou Dobbs -
During one "Broken Borders" segment in May, for example, Dobbs reported on the Senate's immigration reform bill, part of what Dobbs later called "the absolute abdication of responsibility by this government to provide for the safety of the American people." He then reported on a rally in Washington of "illegal aliens and their supporters again trying to pressure Congress into granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in this country." That led into the evening's poll question: "Do you believe US senators and representatives are more concerned with meeting the demands of illegal aliens marching in the streets than they are with their constituents?" The results? Surprise! 96 percent of viewers said yes. (As reported on the show, Dobbs's viewers generally back him up in his polls between 95 and 99 percent of the time.)
The other issue with Dobbs is his employer - CNN. Now many of us, think that CNN has gone FOX Lite on us. And with people like Dobbs, that argument can be made. But to many people CNN is "The Most Trusted Name in News" and to them Dobbs is a journalists, not a pundit. So he must be right (he's RIGHT, alright). But CNN has failed the public on this point and some CNN staffers have taken note of Dobbs.
Another former CNN news staffer from an overseas bureau said (also on condition of anonymity) that whenever Dobbs's producers contacted the bureau for stories, "they would request stories that would fit their agenda.... We wanted to provide a balanced view. But people on Dobbs's show would look at the script and ask for changes. If we gave too much of a balanced view, they would kill the story."
As for why the network tolerated this, both current and former CNN staff, although not privy to executive-level discussions, said their understanding was that Dobbs had autonomy based on finances. "His show brought in a lot of revenue," one former senior Dobbs staffer said.
As another former CNN newsperson put it: "Lou was one of the originals at CNN, and when he left, they really suffered. (Dobbs left CNN in 2000, reportedly after a dispute with management, and returned a year later.) Now Lou is his own island; he dictates to them what he does."
According to several former staffers, many at CNN find Dobbs's views deeply offensive. But over time, many have become jaded. "At first people said, 'How can they let him keep beating this dead horse? There's no even-handedness; it's outrageous,'" one former senior news staffer told me. "But now, people have become so desensitized to it all. Then again, if you want to stand on your soapbox about journalistic integrity, where are you going to go?" (CNN president Jonathan Klein refused The Nation's requests for an interview, but he has told the New York Times that "Lou's show is not a harbinger of things to come at CNN.")
There have also been concerns about Lou getting his "facts" correct. Because he only tells part of the story.
These small stories of xenophobic Americans are transformed into vivid, storybook illustrations of Dobbs's own worldview. Former senior staffers at Dobbs's show told me the anchor specifically searches for local stories to support his positions. "He approaches stories with a partisan ax to grind," one former employee told me, asking not to be named out of fear of reprisal. "He runs the place as a tin-horn dictator. He's assembled correspondents who feel beholden to him. They are given the line on the story and told how to assemble it in his partisan manner before they're sent out to do the story." (A second former senior Dobbs staffer, who also declined to speak on the record, confirmed the accuracy of this description.)
That's led to blatant distortions of key facts. Dobbs searches high and low for statistics showing the negative impact of immigration on the US economy, and he conveniently leaves out contradictory information. In 2003, for example, a reporter on Dobbs's show announced that the National Academy of Sciences had reported that immigrants cost American taxpayers $20 billion a year. But the group's study actually concluded that immigrants add between $1 billion and $10 billion to the annual US gross domestic product. (Dobbs later debated the point on his show with Peter Hart, from the watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, who had noted the distortion; Dobbs insisted he was just reading the data differently.)
More recently, Dobbs reported that the much-debated Senate bill would increase immigration by 100 million people over the next twenty years, costing taxpayers some $54 billion, citing a Heritage Foundation report. But Dobbs didn't mention that the report has been attacked by independent analysts as wildly overstating the numbers. In another broadcast he cited the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) for the statistic that "the net cost of illegal immigration to our economy, including social services, is now roughly $45 billion annually." Less partisan experts, such as Wayne Cornelius, say that's "grossly inaccurate."
But if CNN is not taken note of those journalistic slips then they should be concerned about Lou's guests, because Dobbs has no problem bringing on leaders of Hate Groups as "experts" in immigration.
Dobbs's show "has become the pipeline for nativists and nationalists to move their views from the margins into the mainstream," says Devin Burghart, a director at the Center for New Community, which monitors anti-immigrant groups. "Many of the most hard-core anti-immigrant activists have appeared on his program--people like Joe McCutchen, one-time member of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the largest white nationalist organization in the country. He appeared on the program without any attempt [by Dobbs] to expose his involvement with those organizations."
Indeed, Dobbs often features and quotes activists with links to extremist and even openly racist groups, as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, reported last year. Yet Dobbs consistently fails to mention those connections--even when he or his reporters interview the founder and leader of a hate group. Glenn Spencer, for example, who heads the nativist American Patrol, deemed a hate group by both the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League, was portrayed as a hero for running a "shadow border patrol" with "a handful of committed friends" using technology that rivals the federal government's. The reporter didn't mention that Spencer has also predicted a war with Mexico; his popular website, which often quotes Dobbs and links to his show, spreads rumors that immigrants are plotting to overthrow the Southwest United States. There's also Protect Arizona Now (PAN), which successfully pressed a ballot initiative that denies state services to illegal aliens and requires state employees to report them. Dobbs ran glowing features on the group and its campaign, never mentioning what many news outlets had reported: that Virginia Abernethy, a self-described "white separatist" and former editorial adviser to the white-supremacist CCC, headed PAN's national advisory board.
Dobbs has used material directly from the CCC--in the process spreading and adding legitimacy to some of that group's more bizarre views. In an almost surreal segment in May, Dobbs reporter Casey Wian described the US visit of Mexican President Vicente Fox as a "Mexican military incursion." As Wian spoke, a full-screen graphic appeared, with seven Southwestern states in darker color, portrayed as a map of "Aztlan," a mythical nation of the Aztec people comprising part of the territory Mexico lost to the United States 150 years ago. According to Wian's report, Mexico and "militant Latino activists" secretly aim to take it back. The map was provided by the CCC, which has called blacks "a retrograde species of humanity" and warned that immigration is turning the US population into a "slimy brown mass of glop."
Let's face Dobbs is a racist. He does care about Hispanics. From Dobbs -
"We have a border that is the source of the principal amount of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and meth coming into this country," he proclaimed. "Six thousand National Guardsmen in an adjunct support role is pure cotton-candy nonsense.... We should also be holding the government of Mexico accountable.... They are exporting poverty. They are overcrowding the major schools in Los Angeles. They are creating a crime wave in point of fact in certain parts of the country." (According to experts like Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson, the opposite is true: The nationwide decline in violent crime throughout the 1990s was correlated with a sharp increase in immigration; others have shown that immigrants appear to be less violent than non-immigrants and have the lowest rates of incarceration.)
Dobbs won't say it himself, but he gets the racial card played all the time.
After Diane West, a columnist for the conservative Washington Times, wrote that the United States would "cease to be a nation" if the Senate's immigration reform bill passed, Dobbs invited her on his show and gave her ample time to elaborate. Projected immigration "has the effect of a demographic tsunami, and it will be mainly Hispanic," West said. "It will be mainly Mexican. And so, what the question becomes is, Do we want to become a northern section of Latin America? Do we cease to become literally an English-speaking people, become bilingual, and/or Spanish-speaking? And with these questions, you really begin to get at the heart of the matter ... a new demographic."
Dobbs prudently eased away from West's "demographic" concern. But not completely. "The issue of multiculturalism, however, and the issue of multi-language," he said. "That becomes a very serious issue, doesn't it?"
Dobbs is a racist. He doesn't wear a white cloak and hood, but he sures walks the walk and talks the talk. I just wish more people would see it. Let the flaming begin.