It looks like Fox News finally discovered the secret Howdy Doody talisman that their now-former host Lou Dobbs kept, because according to the Los Angeles Times, they are canceling his show on Fox Business. News of the cancellation comes one day after voting software company Smartmatic filed a lawsuit against Fox News and hosts Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro for $2.7 billion in damages, due to their insistence on promoting evidence free lies about voter fraud and tampering with voting software.
I guess this “cancel culture” is getting out of hand. Or maybe just being sued for lying about companies and ruining those companies’ businesses because of how much lying you are doing is cancel culture now? It’s hard to say; we will need a collection of intellectually bankrupt professors, fitness libertarians, and Tucker Carlson to tell us what this all means. But for now one thing is clear: Lou Dobbs Tonight is canceled.
The LA Times reports that it is unlikely Dobbs will appear on Fox News or Fox Business ever again—he didn’t even host Friday’s final show—though he continues to be under contract to the right-wing outlet, and will continue to pull in whatever exorbitant contract he now has. Sources say that the lawsuit was not the reason for the change, and that this change had been in the works for some time. A representative of the network told the Times that “As we said in October, Fox News Media regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on Fox Business. This is part of those planned changes. A new 5 p.m. program will be announced in the near future.”
Lou Dobbs has been scraping the bottom of the barrel for some time now, like a man who seemed desperate to keep a job that had gotten ready to abandon him. Maybe Lou’s movement into the darkest regions of conspiracy theory and malignant venom was Dobbs’ real self coming out. A lot of flailing right-wingers tied their money wagons to the Trump express, and now that grift ride seems about over. Maybe it was just the scared and angry scream of a man facing the abyss that is his empty life.
The fact that Dobbs remains under contract means that, as far as is being reported, he cannot shop his brand of strange hair dye-driven vitriol and lies over at one of the other scary right-wing networks like Newsmax or OANN.
