'Ax AOL' campaign designed to pressure CNN parent company to fire newsman

4/17/2006
World Net Daily

WASHINGTON – Illegal-alien activists who have pulled off major rallies in several cities in recent weeks plan to shift part of their focus May 1 by targeting a newsman they see hurting their cause.

An "Ax AOL" campaign is being organized to coincide with a national action by various groups defending illegal immigration, but the real target of their wrath is Lou Dobbs of CNN.

"Why AOL?" asks one of the promoters of the campaign rhetorically. "Lou Dobbs is the number one money maker for CNN so he is not going anywhere as long as he makes money for CNN and right now he is making a ton of money for CNN bashing 'illegal immigration.' CNN is owned by Time Warner and Time Warner also owns AOL, which is being extensively promoted to increase its value as witnessed last week by selling 5 percent of AOL stock to Google. This 5 percent cost Google $1 billion setting a benchmark value for AOL stock. The Google-AOL deal gives AOL a valuation of $20 billion. Billionaire Time Warner shareholder Carl Icahn who controls 3 percent of Time Warner shares has been organizing a proxy battle for control of Time Warner wants to sell AOL."

But why Lou Dobbs?

According to the organizers: "Lou Dobbs has become the champion zealot of bashing 'illegal immigration' each night at CNN promoting HR 4437 as the only way of dealing with 'Broken Borders' to protect the USA. The only way to stop Lou Dobbs, the raving populist xenophobe, is to invoke 'The Achilles heel: AOL.'"

Interestingly, Jon Garrido of Hispanic News, the mastermind of the AOL campaign, believes Dobbs is too popular to take on directly.

"We could never directly muzzle Lou Dobbs because the revenue his trashing of Hispanic/Latinos generates for CNN is huge and CNN's revenue belongs to Time Warner," he writes. "The Achilles heel is AOL. If the value of AOL was to decrease dramatically because of the loss of the Hispanic/Latino market, Time Warner, and more so, Carl Icahn, would move to stop this hemorrhage. The only way to stop the hemorrhage would be to meet the demands of the Hispanic/Latino community: Remove Lou Dobbs off the air."

The organizers believe the firing of Lou Dobbs would be the death knell of the current move in Congress to pass tough border security measures and an enforcement plan to deal with the millions of illegal aliens already residing in the U.S.

"Removing Lou Dobbs off the air would completely disarm the national leader of promoting HR 4437 and would be the most powerful message that could be provided to the Congress, President Bush, 2008 presidential candidates and the entire USA," Garrido writes. "The demise of Lou Dobbs would be fatal. There would be nowhere for him to land because wherever he surfaced such as FOX, the Ax AOL campaign would follow him by simply changing our name to Ax FOX."

While Dobbs has become an almost legendary hero to Americans who feel abandoned by their government on the illegal alien issue, he is being vilified in many other quarters.

The left-leaning Media Channel isn't advocating any convoluted targeting of AOL in its anti-Dobbs campaign – just a direct boycott.

Indian-Americans have also launched their own petition to get Dobbs dumped.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, another radical group, is also attacking Dobbs – claiming his reports on immigration fail to acknowledge anti-Hispanic racism is at the root of concerns about illegal immigration.

Even someone Dobbs has had on his show as a guest commentator is getting into the act of calling for his firing by CNN. Enrique Morones, an activist from Southern California, has reportedly written a letter to the president of CNN calling for Dobbs' head.

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