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Lou Dobbs, unchained

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We shouldn’t declare victory over Lou Dobb’s departure from CNN.

 

The damage has already been done, and that’s not a pessimistic view of the matter, it’s a realistic one.

How many attacks on immigrants, even deadly ones, have resulted from the incendiary comments he made day after day? How many people added themselves to the list of those that hate Latinos? How many bought the story that Hispanic immigrants brought leprosy to the US? The damage done is cumulative, and it continues to have serious repercussions on the national psyche.

Dobbs on CNN was a like an unbridled horse, a pseudo-journalist who did not differentiate between opinion and reporting, and what’s worse, a media darling who instilled fear in the vulnerable audience he found.

It was unacceptable for a channel with any scruples to keep him on its roster. It would have been foolish for him not to have left CNN in the face of the increasing pressures of all kinds against him.

But it was CNN itself that unwittingly catapulted the Latino community’s frustration against Dobbs.

The slap in the face of Soledad O’Brien’s documentary, “Latino in America” was the last straw: The irony of a few hours of Latino stereotypes for Hispanic Heritage Month vs. years of abuse and lies from Dobbs.

His resignation may itself be a victory, albeit a delayed one, of the civil activists that launched several national campaigns against his rhetoric of hatred, one of them even targeting the program’s commercial sponsors. But we shouldn’t be so naive, because what ultimately speaks in these circumstances are the “ratings” (read, profits), which in this case were dropping.

For many years, Dobbs showed us how much wrong that can be done from a microphone. He presented himself like a rabid dog, but now the leash has been unfastened, and he’ll keep on barking, be it from another media platform, or worse, from a political platform.

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