CNN’s Lou Dobbs seems to have a problem with leprosy. It’s not that he’s contracted the disease, but his reporting on the subject keeps dogging him.
In 2005, Dobbs reported that Mexican immigration, in addition to all of its other perceived problems, had generated an outbreak of leprosy in this country over the previous three years. Viewers were told that the number of cases had reached 7,000, far more than in the past.
A few weeks ago, Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes asked Dobbs about reporting numbers like these, which appear to be plainly false. “Well, I can tell you this,” Dobbs replied. “If we reported it, it’s a fact.” The 60 Minutes report renewed interest in the two-year-old leprosy report, and a controversy has been brewing ever since.
Just to be clear, Dobbs’ report was wrong. There have been about 7,000 diagnosed cases of leprosy in the United States, but that spans 30 years, not three. The peak year was 1983, when there were 456 cases. Last year, there were 137. Dobbs not only reported bogus information, in an apparent attempt to link immigration and a public-health scare, but he repeated it after the 60 Minutes report, as if he wanted to prove a point.
The NYT’s David Leonhardt devoted his column today to exploring why Dobbs’ errors matter. (via Norwegianity)
Over the last few years, Lou Dobbs has transformed himself into arguably this country’s foremost populist. It’s an odd role, given that he spent the 1980s and ’90s buttering up chief executives on CNN, but he’s now playing it very successfully. He has become a voice for the real economic anxiety felt by many Americans.
The audience for his program has grown 72 percent since 2003, and CBS — yes, the same network that broadcasts “60 Minutes” — just hired him as a commentator on “The Early Show.” Many elites, as Mr. Dobbs likes to call them, despise him, but others see him as a hero. His latest book, “War on the Middle Class,” was a best seller and received a sympathetic review in this newspaper. Mario Cuomo has said Mr. Dobbs is “addicted to economic truth.”
Mr. Dobbs argues that the middle class has many enemies: corporate lobbyists, greedy executives, wimpy journalists, corrupt politicians. But none play a bigger role than illegal immigrants. As he sees it, they are stealing our jobs, depressing our wages and even endangering our lives.
Except, of course, they’re not.
For one thing, Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.
Second, Mr. Dobbs really does give airtime to white supremacy sympathizers. Ms. Cosman, who is now deceased, was a lawyer and Renaissance studies scholar, never a medical doctor or a leprosy expert. She gave speeches in which she said that Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children. Back in their home villages, she would explain, rape was not as serious a crime as cow stealing. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a list of other such guests from “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”
Finally, Mr. Dobbs is fond of darkly hinting that this country is under attack. He suggested last week that the new immigration bill in Congress could be the first step toward a new nation — a “North American union” — that combines the United States, Canada and Mexico. On other occasions, his program has described a supposed Mexican plot to reclaim the Southwest. In one such report, one of his correspondents referred to a Utah visit by Vicente Fox, then Mexico’s president, as a “Mexican military incursion.”
When I asked Mr. Dobbs about this yesterday, he said, “You’ve raised this to a level that frankly I find offensive.”
Yes, of course. Dobbs broadcasts demonstrably false claims repeatedly and the “offensive” part is asking him about his guests and agenda.
And just for good measure, let’s also not forget that CNN still hasn’t run a correction, which seems like the least the network could do under the circumstances.
I’ll gladly concede that there’s a legitimate debate to be had over improving the nation’s immigration system, and Dobbs could have a productive role in the discourse — if only he didn’t blur the line between journalism, editorials, and propaganda.