Lou Dobbs: Broken Record
Lou Dobbs' daily 'Broken Borders' CNN segment has focused on immigration for years. But there's one issue Dobbs just won't take on.

MONTGOMERY, AL (By Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center) — Lou Dobbs is a genial sort, a pleasant-faced CNN anchorman who regularly presents himself as standing up for American working men and women against those who would injure them. Hosting "Lou Dobbs Tonight" for a prime-time hour every weekday, he is also well known and powerful. So when Dobbs focuses on an issue, millions of Americans learn just what it is that Dobbs thinks they should know.

For more than two years now, Dobbs has served up a populist approach to immigration on nightly segments of his newscast entitled "Broken Borders." He has relentlessly covered the issue, although hardly from a traditional news perspective -- Dobbs favors clamping down on illegal immigration, and his "reporting" never fails to make that clear. He has covered the same issues, and the same anti-immigration leaders, time after time after time. In recent months, Dobbs has run countless upbeat reports on the "citizen border patrols" that have sprung up around the country since last April's Minuteman Project, a paramilitary effort to seal the Arizona border.

But there's one thing Lou Dobbs won't do. No matter what others report about the movement, Dobbs has failed to present mounting and persistent evidence of anti-Hispanic racism in anti-immigration groups and citizen border patrols.

It's not that Dobbs hasn't allowed a pro-immigration activist or two to complain about efforts like the Minuteman Project ("vigilantes," according to President Bush), or even that he has made racist statements on his show. What the anchorman has done is repeatedly decline to present the evidence that links these groups to racism, calling the very idea "mind-boggling." On his July 29 show, he called the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which he said he liked in other ways, "despicable" and "reprehensible" for saying otherwise.

Consider some of what Dobbs has failed to report, despite the fact that in almost every case these developments were reported widely elsewhere:

Although Dobbs has steered clear of the racist comments that some of his guests have made elsewhere, he has warned of "illegal aliens who not only threaten our economy and security, but also our health and well-being," according to Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media monitor. In 2003, FAIR added, a reporter on Dobbs' show grossly mischaracterized a National Academy of Sciences report. The report found that immigrants provided a net gain of $1 billion to $10 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product, but the CNN reporter said the report had found the economic impact of immigrants worked out to a net loss of up to $10 billion.

Dobbs is revered in anti-immigration quarters and on the far right generally. He is the winner of the 2004 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration, given by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). CIS claims to be a "nonpartisan research institute," but in fact is a thinly disguised anti-immigration organization. The 2005 Katz Award went to the immigration beat reporter for The Washington Times, a hard-right newspaper based in Washington, D.C.

In general, Lou Dobbs has declined to report salient negative facts about anti-immigration leaders he approves of, or simply avoided mentioning certain of their views -- notably the conspiracy theories propounded by people like Spencer.

Still, Dobbs is hardly immune to the lure of the weird. Last September, he offered up Idaho meteorologist Scott Stevens as a guest on his show. Stevens had just left an Idaho television news program immediately after telling viewers of a bizarre theory that Hurricane Katrina was caused by unknown evildoers. "Terrorists were engaging in a type of eco-terrorism where they could alter the climate, set off earthquakes and volcanoes," he told Dobbs. Stevens said they were using "scalar waves," invented by the Japanese, to attack America with Category 5 storms.

"Intriguing assertion," Dobbs concluded at the end of the interview. Much the same might be said, and in the same spirit, about the news "reporting" that Dobbs presents as he doggedly explores and supports the anti-immigration movement.