http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12116193...eek/from/RS.3/

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Jonathan Darman
Updated: 3:23 a.m. ET April 2, 2006
April 2, 2006 - Immigration is a signature topic for CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. Night after night, he takes to the airwaves and preaches against the Bush administration, taking sharp issue with its border-security policy and its guest-worker plan for illegal aliens. So when President George W. Bush headed to Cancun this week for a summit with Canada and Mexico, Dobbs, who favors tough enforcement of immigration laws, made sure to get himself on a plane. As the president smiled with his fellow leaders, Dobbs looked into the CNN camera and spoke of administration evils.


The venom is paying off. In the first quarter of 2006, total viewership for "Lou Dobbs Tonight" was up 24 percent over the same period a year earlier. But even as he revels in new success, the anchor is receiving his own fair share of criticism, most of it from media critics who call him an anti-immigration zealot. They question the appropriateness of CNN's broadcasting an issue advocate on the air each night. NEWSWEEK’s Jonathan Darman caught Dobbs on the phone from Cancun and asked him about immigration, subjective journalism and Dobbs’s future political plans. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: You’ve been pretty tough on the Mexican government over the years. How are they treating you down there?
Lou Dobbs: The Mexican people and the Mexican government, in their dealings with us they’ve been terrific, as I would have expected.

Has your time on the ground in Mexico this week changed your thinking on immigration at all?
Well, I’ve spent a lot of years covering Mexico, traveling throughout this hemisphere. There’s very little to surprise me. I suppose as a journalist I should never cease to be surprised by the lack of time that governmental leaders spend on issues for which I think they’re poorly briefed. And to watch this trilateral summit proceed with one hour each of bilateral meetings and then a couple of hours among the three, and for them to leave here without a communiqué and nothing but rhetoric in a press conference, it’s sort of a sad demonstration on the parts of the three governments.

To get into that rhetoric a little: did you see anything new in President Bush’s comments at the news conference Friday? Any acknowledgment of the political dispute over immigration in the past week or so?
No, I think he remains as adamant as ever that there be a guest-worker program. I think he is as ever committed to the agenda of corporate America on its ability to exploit cheap labor. The middle class and working men and women in the United States are going to continue to be assaulted by a continuing flow of cheap foreign labor into the United States and outsourcing of jobs to cheap foreign labor markets.

How do you explain this president’s staunchness on this issue? Does it come from sincere, personal belief or has he made a calculation based on political expediency that it’s in his interest to try and please Latino voters?
Well, I certainly give any politician the benefit of the doubt on the issue of sincerity. What I can’t figure out is what the president is sincere about. As president he is responsible for the welfare and the safety and security of 300 million American citizens. And he has chosen, in the course of five years, while he talks about a war on terror and engages in war in Iraq and Afghanistan, to leave our borders absolutely porous, our borders insecure, cargo coming into this country every day all but uninspected, about 5 percent of it is [inspected], this is to me, it’s a sincerity I don’t recognize.


Switching gears to some of the criticisms that are out there of you right now: Did you see Michael Kinsley’s column in the Washington Post Friday?
I did.

He said you’ve transformed from “a mild-mannered news anchor noted for his palsy-walsy interviews with corporate CEOs into a raving populist xenophobe.” What did you think of that?
Kinsley fails to recognize a number of things, but most of all reality and truth. No. 1, I have never once called for a curtailment of immigration. As a matter of fact, I would favor increased legal immigration in this country if indeed we do have a need for labor. But I would do so to avoid exploiting labor, working men and women. Secondly, to say that anyone involved in this debate is a xenophobe or a racist seems to be the first thing uttered when they have run out of facts to support their view. And I’m very disappointed in Michael, who is otherwise quite interesting. Thirdly, for a man who has made a living on opinion journalism, rather than gathering facts over three decades as I have, it’s really remarkable for him to be critical of anyone offering an opinion at all. He has made a living as an opinion journalist. Fourthly, I would say to you, I don’t come to these positions out of thin air or ideological foundation, I’ve been reporting on illegal immigration for years now. The fact that the Senate has taken it up and the president is pushing forward with whatever political capital he has left, is coincidental.

You’re so passionate on this issue, you take such a strong position. Is it appropriate for CNN to give you a platform every night?
Look, there’s a multitude of voices in journalism. No one is compelled to watch my broadcast. My audience expects me to present the news, offer debate and my opinion and the opinion of others as well, on these issues. The fact is that I am passionate about issues such as the outsourcing of jobs, the high cost of free trade, immigration, the failure of government to represent working men and women and our middle class. I’m very sorry to whichever partisan extreme is concerned, but my job is to report an independent, nonpartisan reality, and that’s what we do.

What if this were another issue? What if CNN had a host in the 7 o’clock hour who was passionately opposed to the Bush administration’s Iraq policy and told his viewers as much every night. Would that be appropriate?
I don’t know where you’re going with the hypothetical. There are enough real issues without going to hypotheticals. I’m not sure I take your point.

What I’m getting at is, is it appropriate for a host to take position on any kind of issue? Or is there something specific about the topics you deal with that makes it OK?
The fact is that, I have been covering these issues for years. I know whereof I speak. Our staff is committed to the research and fact-gathering necessary to report on that nonpartisan, independent reality. It would be the worst kind of deceit and negligence to suggest that the he-says, she-says journalism that’s practiced by most new organizations would be anything approximating reality … Democrats and Republicans alike … are, as far as I’m concerned, both under the sway of corporate America and its political dominance over our political system. I truly believe that it’s incumbent upon all journalists--whether they call themselves objective journalists, yeomen, or whatever title they want--there’s never been a time in my career in which there’s a greater urgency and responsibility for us to root out the facts and to deal with what has become disinformation, dissemination, spin, if you will, and to take language seriously and to understand that these orthodoxies that have grown up in this country are something new and something that, in my opinion, are very dangerous to a free marketplace of ideas.

So if he-says, she-says doesn’t work, should all journalists give up the pretense of objectivity?
Listen, I’m not nearly smart enough to say what all journalists should do, and I don’t believe anyone else is either. But I am smart enough to know what I know, what I should do and what is right for me and my audience and what is reasonable and honest.

Switching to the business of cable news: the conventional wisdom recently has been that if you want to attract viewers, you have to go downmarket. Do more Natalee Holloway [the U.S. student who went missing in Aruba] or the runaway bride or that sort of story. But you’re doing all these hours on immigration, a substantive topic that can be pretty dry. How do you explain your rating success?
The fact is, in answer to your question, we’ve benefited, in my view, from the fact that so many news organizations are failing to report on the issues that matter to Americans and to this country. I will tell you that the thousands and thousands of e-mails that we get each evening speaks out very clearly to one thing. These folks, watching our broadcast--my audience--believes that there isn’t anyone in Washington, D.C., who gives a damn about the truth or a damn about them.

Well that raises the question: do you want to run for office?
I’ve been asked to run for office for years. I think our nation is blessed with a sufficient number of politicians. I wouldn’t consider running for office for a nanosecond. Period.