Given all the recent speculation about a possible Lou Dobbs candidacy in the 2012 election, the recent news that Dobbs will instead join the Fox Business Network may strike some people as quite anticlimactic.
Starting in the new year, the former CNN host whose long-running show Lou Dobbs Tonight commanded more than 800,000 viewers, will be taking a job hosting a show at Rupert Murdoch's relatively unwatched business network.
On the final episode of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, exactly one year ago today, Dobbs told his audience that he was being urged by leaders to "go beyond the role at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving as well as to contribute positively to the great understanding of the issues of our day." The ex-TV host, who made his career bashing undocumented immigrants and their employers, stated in June that he had not "ruled out" a run for Senate or the presidency in the next general election.
However, last month The Nation revealed that this longtime critic of "illegal aliens" has himself relied for years on undocumented labor for the upkeep of the grounds of his estate and his show jumping horses.
Just a month after Dobbs was called to account for his hypocrisy on immigration on MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell show and on ABC News, he now appears to be planning a return "to a business-oriented brand" associated with his earlier days at CNN, Jack Mirkinson recently commented on Huffington Post.
Indeed, this may seem a less embarrassing prospect for Dobbs than attempting to turn his tirades against the "illegals" who for years tended to his estate and horses into a political campaign. Even by the admittedly low standards enshrined in Fox programming, Dobbs's credibility as a champion of a get-tough approach to immigration may be destroyed beyond repair.
Yet when it comes to his record on business reporting, Dobbs's hypocrisy has been no less flagrant.
On his CNN show, Dobbs was an outspoken critic of corporate outsourcing, and even created a website, "Exporting America," devoted to exposing individual corporations that he accused of shutting down U.S. factories and moving production overseas to cut labor costs. Yet as a 2004 Columbia Journalism Review article, The Two Faces of Lou Dobbs, documented, many of the same corporations criticized on Dobbs's "Exporting America" site were praised by Dobbs in his now-cancelled exclusive investment newsletter, Lou Dobbs Money Letter. In his Money Letter, Dobbs offered paid subscribers tips on investments, typically going "out of his way to praise [the companies he recommended] as good corporate citizens," according CJR's Zachary Roth.
As Roth noted in his June 2004 article, some of the companies featured in the Lou Dobbs Money Letter, under the heading 'doing good business with good people,' would be familiar to the audience of Dobbs's "Exporting America." In fact, CJC found that of the 14 companies Dobbs highlighted for investors in his newsletter in 2003-4, eight appeared during the same timeframe on his CNN website as companies that outsourced jobs.
It is perhaps not surprising that Dobbs is being offered a position at the Fox Business Network. After all, being an embarrassment to the journalism profession has never been an impediment to landing a job at Fox. And two of the special talents Dobbs demonstrated at CNN, fearmongering about immigrants and entertaining racist conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate, may even be prerequisites to getting one's own show at Murdoch's News Corp empire.
But even so. As Media Matters, America's Voice and Lulac commented in a recent press release, "Lou Dobbs does not deserve a platform on any television network - even one with ratings as low as Fox Business Network."
Follow Isabel Macdonald on Twitter: www.twitter.com/isabelmacdo
Isabel Macdonald: The Dobbs & Pony Show: Snapshots of America's Immigration Hypocrisy
Dan Mirvish: Lou Dobbs Conflict: Still Available for $40,000+ to "Speak"
1) adapt more and more strident conservative positions;
2) Invite the most pedantic and rigid conservative ideologues on your show (or go on theirs);
3) Spew the most illogical and incendiary rhetoric you and your audience can stomach (always couched in understatement);
4) Take more and more nonsensical positions;
5) Have the (liberal) corporate board at your network come down on you for something (anything will suffice);
6) Resign or get fired (either works);
Ring! Ring!
"Roger Ailes on the phone for . . . "
Re Macdonald's concession: Do you have the actual quote from the transcript? Just curious.
Re Dobbs' declarations as to his own perspicacity, his sense of fairness, and his wise impartiality: he's full of it. The blowhard who condescendingly assured Lesley Stahl re his Mexican leprosy rumor-mongering that “if we reported it, it’s a fact” is ensconced on the throne of his own crazy pet kingdom. This is the man who vaunts his own even-handedness, and yet takes presentation materials directly from a nativist/white-supremacist group like the Council of Concervative Citizens, or draws make-believe epidemiological data from a crackpot like Madeleine Cosman; and then, when confronted, feigns ignorance of these people and their bigotries - though he formerly thought them so authoritative.
Re Obama and spine: the first black President of the United States has more "spine" in his little finger than you have in your entire body. That was a nasty little non sequitur: you're looking green, Doctor...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGTMC8eydzw&feature=related
The caption on the cover: "Lou Dobbs, American Hypocrite: While He Railed Against 'Illegals,' They Tended To His Estates And Prize Horses"
When asked what her proof was: "The testimony that I got from the workers..."
On the air, in front of the Nation writer, Dobbs repeated he had never hired any illegals and at worst maybe a landscaper working for him might have employed one, but it is illegal for him to inquire about the status of such workers.
Since the above makes perfect sense, I've now refuted your opening insult, thus making everything else you write questionable.
As for Dobbs' other offenses, an article about these connections you allege would have been more interesting. The Huffington Post writer does not refer to any of what you mention.
For someone who has W.E.B. DuBois as his avatar, you should be ashamed for defending Obama. Has Obama once called the Birther conspiracy racist? Would someone with a backbone have viciously attacked his pastor and his church? Would DuBois have disagreed with a single one of the statements of Jeremiah Wright's that were publicized by the media?
The comment was not a "non sequitur," stemming as it does directly from the Huffington Post essay. Maybe you need to improve your reading comprehension skills.
Americans were promised that we'd never have to deal with illegal immigration again in 1986:
"This amnesty will give citizenship to only 1.1 to 1.3 million illegal aliens. We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forward another amnesty bill like this."
- 1986, Senator Ted Kennedy
What a joke. Instead, what we got was an opening of the floodgates.
Businesses that took advantage of illegals should be prosecuted. Implementing E-Verify. Remember all the rampant ID theft going on? Nothing is being done about that either.
"Give me your tired, your poor...homeless"
I'll say it since everybody else seems afraid; we don't need anymore of the worlds tired & poor coming to America. We have too many tired, poor, jobless and homeless *AMERICANS* - Americans are losing their homes due to the mortgage created by Wall St. / Congress incompetence. America is not the welfare state for the rest of the world & never should be.
Lou was right - he gets my vote & I'm a liberal.
http://www.loudobbs.com
Anchor babies and the 14th Amendment
http://www.cairco.org/issues/anchor_babies.html
Immigration Gumballs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7WJeqxuOfQ
Anyway, my point is that I really liked him when he ranted against outsourcing and other subjects that are threatening the middle class. At the risk of incurring some wrath here, I will say that, in general, his stand against illegal immigration also made some sense to me. That is, what is the point of any nation having borders if those borders don't mean anything. And, yes, I do think illegal immigrants take jobs away from the lowest paid among us. As for those already here, I have no idea what to do about that. The humane thing to do is to let these fine people, our brothers in humanity, stay, but wouldn't that only increase the motivation of others to enter illegally? Its a conundrum to me.
I'm sure you will still hear about immigration on Faux News from him but not so much about outsourcing, etc.
I voted O - and I'm furious with him.
He said he would end the war - as his first act! -- then he sent more troops.
so stuff it with the partisan generalizations
Fox News is becoming a dumping ground for main stream rejects. They have long since bottomed out on credibility.