Critical Exponent

An article in The Nation’s recent “White Heat” issue reports how Lou Dobbs, one of CNN’s stars, has turned his nightly broadcast into a soapbox to air and misinform the public on the alleged threat posed by illegal immigrants:

Many Americans take him seriously. “Outside of elected officials he’s undoubtedly the most influential spokesman for the anti-immigration movement,” says Wayne Cornelius, a political science professor and director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. “I think he’s actually putting real pressure on elected officials by riling up a significant portion of their base.”

[...]

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.

I don’t watch TV, so I’d be interested to know (a) whether Dobb’s show is billed as an editorial rather than a news program, and (b) whether there is a corresponding liberal-biased counterpoint to this show. Regardless, reporting only one side of the story and completely ignoring contrary facts fails the journalistic integrity test, even for an opinion forum.

Dobb’s response (the video is available here; scroll down to find it) is telling. Rather than refuting the claims in The Nation’s article and editorial, he engages in ad hominem attacks. These include not only name-calling, but also red-baiting (he claims The Nation is repeating socialist arguments, the assumption being that such arguments are automatically wrong) and, paradoxically, class warfare (The Nation’s editor is “vacationing…in the Hamptons”).

It bodes bad for our future that political discourse has descended to the playground level.

Salon has an exclusive story on the Abu Ghraib files. Come see what is being done in the name of “American values.” (Warning: Explicit images)

How does your country rate on freedom of the press?

Once again, South Africa is taking a a progressive stand on gay rights:

South Africa’s highest court on Thursday ruled in favour of same-sex marriages, striking down a law that banned gay unions and ordering parliament to draft new legislation within a year.

More details from the BBC and The Washington Post.