[The following commentary, from the Nov. 12 blog of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), summarizes former CNN host Lou Dobbs’ ongoing conflict with Hispanic organizations covering the past half-dozen years. Reprinted with permission. In recent months, a number of Hispanic groups have organized to press CNN president Jonathan Klein through petitions, sponsor contacts and other means to fire him. These efforts, they maintain, plus declining viewership, sponsorship losses and increasing public distrust led to Dobbs’ contract cancellation.]

   TV host Lou Dobbs abruptly quit his CNN program Nov. 11, bringing a sudden end to a television program most notable for its remarkably one-sided presentation of immigration issues.

   Since 2003, Dobbs has regularly used his CNN platform to issue misleading and alarmist warnings about the threats posed by undocumented immigrants. Dobbs has spoken of an "army of invaders" scheming to reannex parts of the southwestern U.S. to Mexico (3/31/06), claimed that "illegal alien smugglers and drug traffickers are on the verge of ruining some of our national treasures" (11/19/03) and declared that "the invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans" (4/14/05).

   Repeated segments on Dobbs' show were devoted to "illegal aliens" getting free medical care (10/1/03), putting their children in schools (10/2/03), committing sex crimes (10/30/03), getting breaks on college tuition (10/22/03), clogging up the federal prison system (11/4/03) and "flooding across our borders in some cases carrying dangerous diseases" (11/20/03). More recently, Dobbs (3/9/09) promoted a misleading report that suggested hundreds of thousands of “illegal immigrants” would get jobs due to the government stimulus program.

   Indeed, he seemed almost eager to misrepresent statistics in order to further his anti-immigrant agenda. Dobbs was famously challenged by CBS host Lesley Stahl (5/6/07) about his erroneous suggestion (4/14/05) that immigrants were causing an alarming increase in leprosy in the United States. Dobbs' remarkable response — "If we reported it, it's a fact" — was just as incorrect as his original reporting (which, it turned out, was based on inaccurate numbers peddled by a far-right anti-immigrant activist — FAIR Action Alert, 5/11/07).

   While that incident received significant attention, it was certainly not the only time Dobbs' program misrepresented reality. FAIR's magazine Extra! (1/2/04) noted that Dobbs distorted a study of the costs and benefits of immigration, turning the study's finding of a small economic benefit into a multi-billion dollar cost to the nation's economy. Dobbs also inflated the proportion of the prison population believed to be undocumented immigrants (New York Times, 5/30/07) and recently garbled a CNN poll on immigration to argue that "most" Americans "want illegal immigrants now in the country to leave" (10/22/09; FAIR Blog, 10/23/09).

   The show was a regular platform for a variety of anti-immigration advocacy groups. Dobbs (5/23/06) even went so far as to use an on-screen graphic from the white supremacist Council of Concerned Citizens in a report fanning fears about Mexican plans to invade the Southwest (Huffington Post, 5/24/06). Dobbs did not leave the overheated rhetoric to his guests, though. Before a Republican presidential debate (11/28/07), he called immigration advocates "misguided abject fools" who are "working to subvert the will of the majority of the people of this country."

   Responding to a reporter's comment about how the governor of Arizona "supports comprehensive immigration reform, including a guest worker program," Dobbs replied (4/19/06): "All I can say to that is lah-dee-dah. The idea that the governor has taken such a superior view over the poor, humble residents of her state is there any kind of — is there any way in which they might turn out at the polls to express their grievances?" Environmental groups opposed to building a border fence between the U.S. and Mexico were "complete idiots" (5/19/08). Immigrants' rights protests were regularly derided (5/1/08): "They ignore the fundamental values of the nation and demand an end to the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. We'll have complete coverage of this travesty."

   Such language is unsurprising, since there was never any pretense of balance to Dobbs' show. As he put it to CNN host Howard Kurtz (4/2/06): "I'm not interested — are you interested in six or seven views, or are you interested in the truth? Because that's what I'm interested in; that's what my viewers are interested in." Declining to present contrasting views because they conflict with one's own definition of "truth" is not exactly the approach they teach in journalism school, of course. As reported by Daphne Eviatar in The Nation (8/28/06), some CNN reporters were concerned by the show's techniques: 

   “Another former CNN news staffer from an overseas bureau said (also on condition of anonymity) that whenever Dobbs' 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' show would look at the script and ask for changes. If we gave too much of a balanced view, they would kill the story.’"

   Former senior staffers said that Dobbs would search out stories that supported his anti-immigrant agenda. As one put it, "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."

   One of Dobbs' standard defenses over the years has been that his concern is illegal immigration, not legal immigration. But Dobbs' show blurred that distinction a number of times. Dobbs introduced one report (11/4/03) about "illegal aliens, those noncitizens taking up a third of the cells in our federal penitentiaries." The ensuing report noted that there was no way of knowing how many prisoners were actually illegal.

   In 2003, Dobbs (9/23/03) expressed outrage over a group of immigrants' rights activists: "People who have not respected immigration laws in this country are now demanding equal treatment under the law." A week later (9/30/03), Dobbs acknowledged that the activists he was criticizing were not, in fact, lawbreakers. In 2008, Dobbs (1/16/08) attacked the campaign activities of one Nevada union, complaining that "as many as half of the union's members are illegal aliens." Actually, the union had reported that about half of its members were immigrants.

   It should be noted that Dobbs' troubling record of distortion is not limited to immigration. He has featured one-sided discussions on climate change (12/18/08, 1/5/09) and issued nonsensical complaints about the White House economic stimulus plan (Extra!, 4/09). Dobbs was one of many figures in the corporate media to cheer a premature Iraq War victory ("Some journalists, in my judgment, just can't stand success, especially a few liberal columnists and newspapers and a few Arab reporters" — 4/14/03), and most recently caused a stir (Associated Press, 8/3/09) by giving airtime to "birther" guests to advance the discredited notion that Barack Obama is not actually a U.S. citizen.

   In his final CNN broadcast (11/12/09), Dobbs suggested that he would continue in the public arena in some fashion: "Some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving as well as to contribute positively to a better understanding of the great issues of our day." Dobbs also alluded to "the lack of true representation in Washington, D.C."

   Dobbs' propagandistic approach to journalism was an embarrassment that CNN seemed more than willing to tolerate as long as his ratings were high (Extra!, 5-6/06); with much of the cultural anxiety formerly going into the anti-immigration movement now focused on the Tea Party movement associated with Glenn Beck, Dobbs' viewership has been in a prolonged slump (New York Observer, 7/30/09), so it's not too surprising to find him looking for a new home. CNN president Jonathan Klein once told The New York Times (3/29/06): "Lou's show is not a harbinger of things to come at CNN. He is sui generis, one of a kind." One can only hope.

   (For additional commentary on Dobbs’ removal, check Hispanic Link’s website www. HispanicLink.org throughout this coming week. For more reports by FAIR, go to www.fair.org)

   ©2009