I love CNN. It’s my third favorite non-print news source, right after the ever-accurate, globally-focused BBC and the in-depth reportage of NPR.
I do not like Lou Dobbs on CNN. I think this guy exploits the dispossessed and profits from American wage disparity. The middle class shrinks, in numbers and in fear, as the wealthiest 2% become richer and the rest of us are broke and broker. Meanwhile, Lou Dobbs blames undocumented workers for our economic woe, like the guy mowing lawns for the wealthiest 2% is somehow responsible for all of our credit card debt. Instead of focusing more on CEO salaries, Dobbs focuses too much on minimum wage salaries, as if immigrants were powerful enough to significantly impact how much the middle class gets paid.
According to yesterday’s New York Times David Leonhardt article, “Truth, Fiction and Lou Dobbs,” Dobbs has been doing more than mixing commentary with news. He’s been outright lying and giving air time to guests who have relationships with White Supremacist organizations.
First, a Dobbs’ inaccuracy: Dobbs has said, according to Leonhardt’s Times article, that 1/3 of the inmates in our Federal prison system are “illegal immigrants.” The truth, according to Leonhardt’s article, is that, “For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than among natives.”
And now the White Supremacists: The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has a list of anti-Semitic and racist comments made by guests of Lou Dobbs, some of them men who arm themselves, patrol our borders, and want “to shoot the taco meat,” according to one former Texas Minuteman who resigned because of the group’s racism.
And we all know that the folk who hate brown people tend to hate black people, too. Another former guest of Lou Dobbs, Glenn Spencer, runs the anti-immigration American Patrol, a group denounced by the Anti-Defamation League. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Spencer has said that “thousands will die” in a forthcoming Mexican invasion. Spencer has spoken twice to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that the SPLC says has called African Americans “a retrograde species of humanity.” This former guest of Dobbs has also spoken once with American Renaissance, a group that says that Blacks are genetically inferior to Whites, according to the SPLC site.
Wolf Blitzer, who I think is a fine journalist, has also had Spencer on his show according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, but Blitzer mentioned the Mexican government’s official response and the SPLC’s designation of Spencer’s American Patrol as a hate group.
Many of my neighbors, students, friends, and family are immigrants to this country. I have nothing but respect for women and men who travel hundreds of miles and work under the most stressful conditions to help support their families. The Mexican workers I know pay their bills, go to school, spend Sundays with family, and never work on Easter or Christmas. They pray, they save, they struggle.
Leave them alone, Lou.
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I agree with a lot of what you say, but to be fair, he doesn’t squarely blame immigrants for the crushing of the middle class. Lou started off as the Business anchor and a friend of corporate America. After a number of years on air he had an epiphany and started his crusade initially against what he saw was slovenly corporate governance, flouting of securities and banking laws, naked greed, too much devotion to quarterly outlooks as opposed to the long term, and indeed outsourcing and ludicrous trade with China, even environmental issues. I think he started off using immigration as an example of how corp. America uses immigrants, but yeah, he started getting more and more strident. I don’t think he’s given up on the notion that the rich are crushing the rest of us, but he’s gone too far.
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Thanks for that background info, Chris, of which I was unaware. I do hear him going after the corporate fat cats, but it seems every promo for his show is about crushing “illegal immigrants,” often contextualized in his crusade to save the middle class. I don’t think pitting the poor against the middle class is going to save any of us. I wish he would do more of his investigation of corporate America, and less of his assault against immigrant America.
Thanks again!
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CNN pretends to be neutral – yet they milk the ad dollars generated by fear-mongering. The following article examines in-depth, why Lou Dobbs is a tactical propagandist worse than Dr. Joseph Goebbels ? The Nazi Minister of ‘Propaganda and Enlightenment.’: CNN’s Lou Dobbs – The Minister of ‘Propaganda and Enlightenment’