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Edited on Thu Aug-24-06 05:29 PM by LaPera
Dobbs began turning his longtime financial-news show, CNN's Moneyline, into an opinion rant about five years ago, capitalizing on the issue of outsourcing. Attacking free-trade policies and the companies that take advantage of them in a series of segments called "Exporting America," Dobbs increasingly cast himself as a quixotic champion of an American middle class ignored by politicians in the interests of big business. Although his privately sold newsletter still recommended investing in some of the companies outsourcing the most jobs, as reported by the Columbia Journalism Review, publicly Dobbs became the Harvard-educated spokesman for the little guy. The little American, that is. Over time, Dobbs's anger that foreigners overseas were getting formerly American jobs was transformed into fury at the foreigners taking the low-paid jobs that are still here. "Broken Borders" was born. By vilifying immigrants, Dobbs is following in a long line of illustrious, and notorious, Americans who have played pivotal roles in the nation's periodic outbreaks of nativism . "Whenever we've had a great wave of immigration, there's been a backlash," says Wayne Cornelius. But there's a difference this time. "In previous waves, the reaction can be attributed in part to economics. Now, unemployment is down to 4 percent; there's no reason to target them."
"It is no accident that they chose May 1 as their day of demonstration and boycott. It is the worldwide day of commemorative demonstrations by various socialist, communist and even anarchic organizations.... No matter which flag demonstrators and protesters carry today, their leadership is showing its true colors to all who will see."
You might expect that sort of McCarthyesque description from Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh or some other famously right-wing provocateur on Fox or talk-radio. But Lou Dobbs, on CNN? These days, the network once pilloried by conservatives as a leading voice of the "liberal media" is offering an expansive platform to the nation's leading spokesman for anti-immigration hardliners. Night after night, under the rousing headline "Broken Borders," the distinguished-looking 61-year-old instructs his growing audience that illegal immigrants import deadly diseases, rampant crime and international terrorism; they live off welfare, destroy public schools and burden hospitals; what's more, most haven't even learned to speak English. Add that they're foot soldiers sent by the Mexican government to "reconquer" the Southwest, and by the end of the hour, we have seen the enemy--and he's a Spanish-speaking immigrant. Despite the grave threat, Dobbs declares, our lawmakers are doing nothing about it. Thus Dobbs branded the recent bipartisan Senate reform bill, designed to allow more immigrants to work here legally while also securing the borders, "The Amnesty Agenda"--a "pathetic sham" that would make a "mockery" of the American people.
Still, Dobbs, who abandoned the financial-news pretense when he renamed his show Lou Dobbs Tonight in 2003, has taken an increasingly hard-line, restrictionist view. He champions Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner's bill in the US House (HR 4437), which would make assisting any undocumented immigrant a felony. He supports sending tens of thousands of troops to militarize the US-Mexico border, and favors building a fence along its entire length. And although he's never acknowledged it, his constant call for enforcing US immigration law would mean deporting some 12 million people
Still, CNN showcases its popular anchor at every opportunity. In May, when President Bush gave his national speech on immigration reform, CNN watchers heard more from Dobbs than from the President--first on his own show, then on The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer, and later on Larry King Live and Anderson Cooper 360. "It's time to cut through the nonsense here," Dobbs announced on The Situation Room, assuming the grave-yet-contemptuous look he reserves for this issue. "We have a border that is the source of the principal amount of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and meth coming into this country," he proclaimed. "Six thousand National Guardsmen in an adjunct support role is pure cotton-candy nonsense.... We should also be holding the government of Mexico accountable.... They are exporting poverty. They are overcrowding the major schools in Los Angeles. They are creating a crime wave in point of fact in certain parts of the country." (According to experts like Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson, the opposite is true: The nationwide decline in violent crime throughout the 1990s was correlated with a sharp increase in immigration; others have shown that immigrants appear to be less violent than non-immigrants and have the lowest rates of incarceration.)
These small stories of xenophobic Americans are transformed into vivid, storybook illustrations of Dobbs's own worldview. Former senior staffers at Dobbs's show told me the anchor specifically searches for local stories to support his positions. "He approaches stories with a partisan ax to grind," one former employee told me, asking not to be named out of fear of reprisal. "He runs the place as a tin-horn dictator. 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." (A second former senior Dobbs staffer, who also declined to speak on the record, confirmed the accuracy of this description.)
That's led to blatant distortions of key facts. Dobbs searches high and low for statistics showing the negative impact of immigration on the US economy, and he conveniently leaves out contradictory information. In 2003, for example, a reporter on Dobbs's show announced that the National Academy of Sciences had reported that immigrants cost American taxpayers $20 billion a year. But the group's study actually concluded that immigrants add between $1 billion and $10 billion to the annual US gross domestic product. (Dobbs later debated the point on his show with Peter Hart, from the watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, who had noted the distortion; Dobbs insisted he was just reading the data differently.)
More recently, Dobbs reported that the much-debated Senate bill would increase immigration by 100 million people over the next twenty years, costing taxpayers some $54 billion, citing a Heritage Foundation report. But Dobbs didn't mention that the report has been attacked by independent analysts as wildly overstating the numbers. In another broadcast he cited the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) for the statistic that "the net cost of illegal immigration to our economy, including social services, is now roughly $45 billion annually." Less partisan experts, such as Wayne Cornelius, say that's "grossly inaccurate."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060828/eviatar/2
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060828/eviatar
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