COMMENTARY
Nightly Nativism
By Daphne Eviatar- The Nation
- August 28, 2006 Issue
On May 1 the nationwide boycott billed as "A Day
Without Immigrants" was all over the evening news. ABC's World News
Tonight reported that "more than a million people took to the streets
in thirty cities," part of "a new wave of protests against legislation
that would increase the penalties for being in the US illegally." On
CBS, "they left their jobs and took to the streets to show us what
America would be like without millions of immigrant workers." On Fox,
"illegal immigrants and their allies took to streets across
America...in an effort to show their economic importance to the
country."
But on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, it was a different story. "Hundreds of
thousands of illegal aliens and their supporters today failed in their
attempt to shut down most of our cities to support amnesty for all
illegal aliens," the network's 6 pm news anchor reported that evening.
Dobbs elaborated in his online column: "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.
Dobbs's hysteria and jingoism are now notorious. He's been ridiculed
by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show for calling for the abolition of
"ethnocentric" holidays that involve waving other nations' flags (thus
eliminating St. Patrick's Day); by Andy Borowitz, who wrote in
Newsweek that President Bush had decided to move Dobbs to the Mexican
border instead of 6,000 National Guard troops; and by the hosts of a
Los Angeles radio show, who recently offered a cash prize to the first
illegal immigrant mother to name her baby Lou Dobbs.
If the anchor's antics make for good comedy, they also have a sinister
side: 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."
As if to underscore that influence, Dobbs conducts a poll that works
something like a viewer comprehension test. During one "Broken
Borders" segment in May, for example, Dobbs reported on the Senate's
immigration reform bill, part of what Dobbs later called "the absolute
abdication of responsibility by this government to provide for the
safety of the American people." He then reported on a rally in
Washington of "illegal aliens and their supporters again trying to
pressure Congress into granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens
in this country." That led into the evening's poll question: "Do you
believe US senators and representatives are more concerned with
meeting the demands of illegal aliens marching in the streets than
they are with their constituents?" The results? Surprise! 96 percent
of viewers said yes. (As reported on the show, Dobbs's viewers
generally back him up in his polls between 95 and 99 percent of the
time.)
Slightly more scientific polls are almost as conclusive. A recent CNN
survey revealed that more people trust Dobbs than the President on the
issue of illegal immigration. As Jack in California wrote, in one of
the many adulatory letters Dobbs reads during every broadcast, "Lou
Dobbs for President. Impeach Vicente Fox!"
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 [see Daniel Tichenor, page
25]. "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."
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.
As the stakes grow higher and Dobbs's tone more shrill, his popularity
has soared. In the second quarter of this year his show had the
largest total viewer growth of any on CNN, with more than 800,000
viewers each night. While that's still only half of O'Reilly's
top-rated cable-news audience, Dobbs is catching up, and CNN is giving
its star more and more airtime. Now, in addition to five hours a week
on his own show, Dobbs is regularly featured as an immigration expert
on CNN's other evening news programs. (CNN says Dobbs is a legitimate
immigration specialist deserving of extra airtime: "Anytime you can
have somebody bring that level of expertise to a subject, you'd want
to have that knowledge on the air," says network spokeswoman Christa
Robinson.)
Not everyone inside CNN feels that way. Although the network keeps a
tight rein on what even former staff can say (former anchor Aaron
Brown, for example, needed permission from CNN to speak to me, which
was denied), one senior former Dobbs staffer told me, on condition of
anonymity: "Lou went from straddling the line between journalist and
pundit to becoming a full-blown pundit, shifting the debate very, very
far to the right. People don't get it. They trust that CNN is a
reputable organization, so they trust that he's a respected
journalist. They think he won't put anyone on who's a right-wing nut.
But he does."
Another former CNN news staffer from an overseas bureau said (also on
condition of anonymity) that whenever Dobbs's producers contacted the
bureau for stories, "they would request stories that would fit their
agenda.... We wanted to provide a balanced view. But people on Dobbs's
show would look at the script and ask for changes. If we gave too much
of a balanced view, they would kill the story."
As for why the network tolerated this, both current and former CNN
staff, although not privy to executive-level discussions, said their
understanding was that Dobbs had autonomy based on finances. "His show
brought in a lot of revenue," one former senior Dobbs staffer said.
As another former CNN newsperson put it: "Lou was one of the originals
at CNN, and when he left, they really suffered. (Dobbs left CNN in
2000, reportedly after a dispute with management, and returned a year
later.) Now Lou is his own island; he dictates to them what he does."
According to several former staffers, many at CNN find Dobbs's views
deeply offensive. But over time, many have become jaded. "At first
people said, 'How can they let him keep beating this dead horse?
There's no even-handedness; it's outrageous,'" one former senior news
staffer told me. "But now, people have become so desensitized to it
all. Then again, if you want to stand on your soapbox about
journalistic integrity, where are you going to go?" (CNN president
Jonathan Klein refused The Nation's requests for an interview, but he
has told the New York Times that "Lou's show is not a harbinger of
things to come at CNN.")
Crass commercialism isn't a new motive for TV news, of course. But in
this case, the impact may be profound. Dobbs's show "has become the
pipeline for nativists and nationalists to move their views from the
margins into the mainstream," says Devin Burghart, a director at the
Center for New Community, which monitors anti-immigrant groups. "Many
of the most hard-core anti-immigrant activists have appeared on his
program--people like Joe McCutchen, one-time member of the Council of
Conservative Citizens (CCC), the largest white nationalist
organization in the country. He appeared on the program without any
attempt [by Dobbs] to expose his involvement with those
organizations."
Indeed, Dobbs often features and quotes activists with links to
extremist and even openly racist groups, as the Southern Poverty Law
Center, which tracks hate groups, reported last year. Yet Dobbs
consistently fails to mention those connections--even when he or his
reporters interview the founder and leader of a hate group. Glenn
Spencer, for example, who heads the nativist American Patrol, deemed a
hate group by both the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League, was
portrayed as a hero for running a "shadow border patrol" with "a
handful of committed friends" using technology that rivals the federal
government's. The reporter didn't mention that Spencer has also
predicted a war with Mexico; his popular website, which often quotes
Dobbs and links to his show, spreads rumors that immigrants are
plotting to overthrow the Southwest United States. There's also
Protect Arizona Now (PAN), which successfully pressed a ballot
initiative that denies state services to illegal aliens and requires
state employees to report them. Dobbs ran glowing features on the
group and its campaign, never mentioning what many news outlets had
reported: that Virginia Abernethy, a self-described "white separatist"
and former editorial adviser to the white-supremacist CCC, headed
PAN's national advisory board.
Dobbs has used material directly from the CCC--in the process
spreading and adding legitimacy to some of that group's more bizarre
views. In an almost surreal segment in May, Dobbs reporter Casey Wian
described the US visit of Mexican President Vicente Fox as a "Mexican
military incursion." As Wian spoke, a full-screen graphic appeared,
with seven Southwestern states in darker color, portrayed as a map of
"Aztlan," a mythical nation of the Aztec people comprising part of the
territory Mexico lost to the United States 150 years ago. According to
Wian's report, Mexico and "militant Latino activists" secretly aim to
take it back. The map was provided by the CCC, which has called blacks
"a retrograde species of humanity" and warned that immigration is
turning the US population into a "slimy brown mass of glop."
Earlier this year, Lou Dobbs Tonight covered a local protest in
California against Home Depot's efforts to hire Spanish-speaking
workers. Dobbs aired a clip of California Coalition for Immigration
Reform spokeswoman Barbara Coe--identified merely as a
protester--saying Home Depot had "betray[ed] the American people."
Dobbs didn't mention that Coe's coalition is considered a hate group,
or that she is a CCC member who's referred to Mexicans as "savages"
and, in a speech last year, called undocumented workers "illegal
barbarians who are cutting off heads and appendages of blind, white,
disabled gringos."
"They're not willing to tell the truth about these groups," says Mark
Potok, editor of the SPLC's Intelligence Report. Two years ago Potok
alerted Dobbs and his staff to the backgrounds of their extremist
guests. In response, Dobbs sent five producers and reporters to
Montgomery, Alabama, for all-day meetings with the SPLC's hate
monitors. "As they left they were promising to do a series on
extremism and racism," says Potok. "They never did anything."
Instead, Dobbs's show continued to showcase extremists--many of whom
now hail the anchor as their champion. The Washington-based Center for
Immigration Studies, which describes itself as animated by a
"low-immigration vision" and whose leaders are frequent guests on
Dobbs's show, gave Dobbs its Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the
Coverage of Immigration in 2004. CIS executive director Mark Krikorian
praises Dobbs for his "unusual voice among the elite that expresses
the widespread public concern over immigration," adding that Dobbs's
"conventional business background gives him even more credibility with
the general public." Asked if CIS feeds Dobbs material for his show,
Krikorian responded: "We used to send him stuff, but since he decided
to really take up the issue, he started calling us." (Dobbs himself
refused repeated requests for comment.)
Dobbs's Home Depot story exemplified another specialty--showcasing
otherwise insignificant anti-immigrant protests to make a particular
Dobbsian point. On his nightly newscasts, the small-town border
sheriff and his volunteer posse take on the status of war heroes. The
Minuteman Civil Defense Corps [see Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse,
page 29] becomes a vigorous volunteer border patrol. The woman whose
Social Security number was stolen becomes the sympathetic face of
hardworking Americans victimized by cheating and conniving immigrants.
And right-wing groups calling for a "tourism boycott of Massachusetts"
to protest the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill--or, as Dobbs puts it,
"Kennedy's stance on amnesty"--get instant publicity.
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."
In truth, the evidence is mixed on the impact of illegal immigration
on American workers. While there's evidence that large numbers of
illegal immigrants exert a slight downward pressure on wages in the
lowest-paying industries, it's also clear that the influx of
immigrants has expanded the national economy, creating many new jobs.
Dobbs is correct that working-class wages have stagnated in recent
decades, but most economists blame new technology and the loss of
manufacturing jobs, not illegal immigration. As more than 500
independent economists, including five Nobel laureates, declared in an
open letter to President Bush and Congress in June, "the gains from
immigration outweigh the losses."
Such reasoned analysis and nuance are not Dobbs's forte. Dobbs does
invite guests he disagrees with on his show--the better to ramp up the
drama. But he quickly derides their arguments, scoffs at their data
and interrupts their answers. When Janet Murguia, president of the
National Council of La Raza, tried explaining how making English the
official language of the United States could endanger non-English
speakers during a crisis, Dobbs ignored the point and commented:
"Implicit in what Janet just said is some suggestion that this is not
a warm or welcoming country." He dismissed that notion by saying that
the United States is "littered with languages [that are] not English."
Not surprisingly, after such treatment, many "guests" have refused to
appear on his show a second time. Former employees told me that
Dobbs's producers are frequently turned down by reputable experts. One
immigration expert I interviewed, who asked not to be named so as to
avoid a public feud, said he refused to appear on CNN at all because
of Dobbs.
Cornelius was on the show once, but he says he was "hoodwinked" and
won't do it again. "The only part of the interview they used was me
saying, 'Yes, enforcement has collapsed since the early 1990s, and
there's no objective risk of an undocumented immigrant being
apprehended at the workplace.' They left out that the reason is
primarily because of the economic disruption it would cause. It's not
just a matter of incompetence; the costs of enforcing the immigration
laws to the economy and society generally are too high." Cornelius had
added that strict enforcement wouldn't eliminate illegal employment,
just drive it further underground. But that was all edited out, he
says. "It made me look as if I were just another soldier in Lou's
army."
Angelo Amador, immigration expert for the US Chamber of Commerce, has
had similar experiences and now refuses to appear on taped segments.
"When it's taped they use what they want to," he says. "After I said
no, the producer called me back and said they couldn't get any
business groups to go on the show. I wasn't surprised."
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.)
Dobbs's concerns go far beyond illegal immigration. When he accepted
the Katz Award from CIS--after a glowing introduction from Congressman
Tom Tancredo, the leading anti-immigration extremist in Washington and
a frequent Dobbs guest--he explained that illegal immigration "spans a
broad range of fundamental issues that should be of concern to all
Americans who are worried about the direction of this country." After
noting that the US population has doubled in forty years, Dobbs warned
his audience, "We are importing the population growth of other
countries, whether it's China or Mexico or any country in the world."
Dobbs's fears about the cultural impact of immigration on the United
States apply to Latino American immigrants across the board, legal or
illegal. That some sang the national anthem in Spanish while
protesting the Sensenbrenner bill this spring, for example, seemed to
hit at the heart of his concerns: What will this nation look like, and
sound like, in the future?
That anxiety, fueled in part by demographic studies showing that white
Americans will be a minority within the next two decades, may well
explain why Dobbs connects with such a large and loyal audience. The
anchor takes care not to discuss immigration issues in explicitly
racial terms. But he schedules guests on his show to make the
demographic point.
After Diane West, a columnist for the conservative Washington Times,
wrote that the United States would "cease to be a nation" if the
Senate's immigration reform bill passed, Dobbs invited her on his show
and gave her ample time to elaborate. Projected immigration "has the
effect of a demographic tsunami, and it will be mainly Hispanic," West
said. "It will be mainly Mexican. And so, what the question becomes
is, Do we want to become a northern section of Latin America? Do we
cease to become literally an English-speaking people, become
bilingual, and/or Spanish-speaking? And with these questions, you
really begin to get at the heart of the matter ... a new demographic."
Dobbs prudently eased away from West's "demographic" concern. But not
completely. "The issue of multiculturalism, however, and the issue of
multi-language," he said. "That becomes a very serious issue, doesn't
it?"
For the hundreds of thousands who tune in faithfully to watch Lou
Dobbs, securing our "broken borders" may be as much about preserving
white American culture as about security or economics. It's a cause
white nationalists have long advanced. But it's a new role for
television news.
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