MAD AS HELL
Lou Dobbs’s populist crusade.

by KEN AULETTA
Issue of 2006-12-04
Posted 2006-11-27


Regular viewers of “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” on CNN, might be surprised at the venue that Dobbs chose for lunch not long ago: the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, a midtown bastion of the very same political and business “élites” that he denounces daily on his television program. The Four Seasons is the enduring commissary of the Old Guard, where Henry Kissinger waves to the former Citigroup C.E.O. Sandy Weill, there is limo-lock at the side door, and the regulars have their checks sent to the office. Dobbs’s Town Car left him at the door, on East Fifty-second Street, and the restaurant’s co-owner, Julian Nicolini, embraced him that day as warmly as when he welcomed, among others, Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group; Nelson Peltz, the C.E.O. of Trian Partners; Edgar Bronfman, Sr., the former chairman and C.E.O. of Seagram; and Mortimer Zuckerman, the real-estate developer and publisher of the News. Nicolini led Dobbs to one of five choice banquettes, and Dobbs settled in, looking very much at home.

Dobbs is sixty-one, and his chubby face has a rosy glow. His blond hair is lacquered in place, his black wing tips are impeccably buffed. Other club members having lunch that day—the Nobel Prize winner James Watson, Bronfman, Peltz, the movie producer Harvey Weinstein—stopped at the table to say hello. It is the kind of welcome that one might have expected for an earlier incarnation of Lou Dobbs—the Harvard-educated anchor of CNN’s “Moneyline,” which in the nineteen-nineties served as a sort of video clubhouse for corporate America. But, in the past four years or so, Dobbs has been reborn as a populist—a full-throated champion of “the little guy,” an evangelical opponent of liberal immigration laws. His hour-long program, which airs at six, features Dobbs in a role that combines Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan. On the air, he boomingly assails the upper management of corporate America for its “outrageous” greed, pay packages, and corruption, its opposition to increasing the minimum wage, its hiring of “illegal aliens,” its ties to “Communist China,” and its eagerness to send American jobs overseas.

The new Lou Dobbs often surprises those who recall the old Lou Dobbs of “Moneyline.” Daniel Henninger, the deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote, “Old admirers are aghast. It’s as if whatever made Linda Blair’s head spin around in ‘The Exorcist’ had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich,” a reference to the left-wing Ohio congressman and former Presidential aspirant. After an angry altercation on the show with James Glassman, a former New Republic publisher and current conservative supply-sider, Glassman said of Dobbs, “How did he transform from a business sycophant to a raving populist?” Glassman’s answer was that Dobbs had begun to “demagogue these issues.” (In questioning Glassman’s economic theories on his program, Dobbs accused him of talking “like a cult member.”) As if to answer such critics, Dobbs has recently published a book whose title is almost as long as the menu at the Grill Room: “War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and HOW TO FIGHT BACK.”

On the cover, Dobbs is standing—hands in pockets, feet apart—like a sentry protecting the boundaries of decency and the nation. At CNN, alone among the cable network’s anchors, he is allowed to express his opinions without borders. “I’m never neutral on any issue that affects the common good, our national interest, and working men and women of this country,” he writes. In many ways, Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News, who in 2003 wrote a book entitled “Who’s Looking Out for You?,” are kindred spirits. Dobbs, who lives on a three-hundred-acre farm in a prosperous part of New Jersey, admires his own capacity for compassion and self-effacement. His audience, he writes, knows that he cares “more about them and their lives than about being invited to the White House or playing golf with C.E.O.s and celebrities.”

For most of its first half hour, “Lou Dobbs Tonight” contains more domestic and international news than does each of the three major network’s broadcasts, and Dobbs fills the role of the well-informed anchorman. Yet he also teases his audience, with headlines from stories that run in the second half hour, which is dominated by what Dobbs’s executive producer, Jim McGinnis, refers to as “brands”—segments with names like “Broken Borders,” “Homeland Insecurity,” “War on the Middle Class,” “Exporting America,” and “The Best Government Money Can Buy.”

“It’s very different from any program you’ll see on TV, by intention,” Dobbs said, as we ordered the fifty-six-dollar Dover sole. “What you won’t see on our broadcast is ‘fair and balanced journalism.’ You will not see ‘objective journalism.’ The truth is not ‘fair and balanced.’ There is a nonpartisan, independent reality that doesn’t give a damn, frankly, what two Democrats and two Republicans think about anything or say about anything.”

The cable-news universe is relatively small. About eight hundred thousand people watch “Lou Dobbs Tonight” (about nine million watch the “Nightly News,” on NBC), and in its time slot it lags behind Brit Hume’s show, on Fox, which has about a million and a half viewers. But Dobbs is narrowing the gap, and his news program is one of the handful on cable whose audiences are growing, rather than shrinking. The highest-rated cable news program is “The O’Reilly Factor,” on Fox, which averages about two million viewers, and Fox continues to lead CNN in the ratings, with MSNBC a distant third. A program’s ranking is affected by the length of time that viewers stay with it, and news shows that do best tend to have opinionated anchors, like Fox’s O’Reilly and Sean Hannity; MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, whose audience has increased by two-thirds in the past year; and Dobbs, whose broadcast has drawn twenty-two per cent more viewers in the past twelve months. In October, the network announced that “Lou Dobbs Tonight” would expand from five nights to seven, and Dobbs was named one of CNN’s four Election Night anchors.

Dobbs has been with CNN since Ted Turner launched the cable network from Atlanta, in 1980, and both Dobbs and CNN have changed in the intervening years. Turner once liked to contrast CNN with the broadcast networks by saying that “news was the star” and that CNN expunged opinions from its news. Today, CNN heavily promotes its star anchors—particularly Dobbs, Larry King, whose show airs at nine, and Anderson Cooper, who comes on at ten. Cooper regularly travels to trouble spots and shares with viewers his personal responses to situations, and one longtime CNN employee said of his show, “It’s almost a fact-free zone. It’s a feeling zone.”

Unlike Fox, whose identity among its core viewers is often described as a celebration of conservatives, CNN seems to have adopted a “We’re on your side” stance as a way to boost ratings. It was encouraged by Dobbs, but also by Cooper, who expressed his outrage at the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and by Jack Cafferty, in cranky commentaries on Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room.” For nine nights in October, CNN ran a series called “Broken Government,” as well as two hour-long Dobbs town-hall meetings—the first on the “forgotten middle class,” the second on illegal immigration. CNN’s ratings improved dramatically, particularly among the most desirable demographic, twenty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds.

Jon Klein, the president of CNN in the United States, told me that when he arrived at the cable network, soon after the 2004 election, there was a perception that CNN would become more like Fox and that news, as he put it, “had to be glitzy and a diversion”—a series of tabloid narratives with constant updates. “No one wanted to cover Natalee Holloway, but they thought they had to,” Klein says, referring to the teen-ager who disappeared in Aruba. “That’s not said from some moral high ground. It’s business. If everyone else on television is doing it, don’t you want to do something else?” With its excitable coverage of these stories, Klein believed that CNN “was alienating its audience,” and damaging its credibility. From the digital world, where he once worked and where he could chart what people watched and when interest waned, he “learned that people get tired of stories easily.” Although CNN hardly ignores the more diverting stories, Klein wanted people at the network to “decide for ourselves what is important,” and CNN to distinguish itself through what he called “differentiation.”

Klein, who is forty-eight, spent nearly two decades in various capacities at CBS News, where he produced both serious work (overseeing “60 Minutes” and winning a Peabody Award for “48 Hours,” which is emphasized in his official biography) and less-serious news (the softening of “48 Hours,” which goes unmentioned). In 1999, after leaving CBS, he founded a broadband video company, the FeedRoom, which tells companies how to use video on the Internet.

With a worldwide staff of four thousand, CNN had more reporting resources than any of its competitors. When the tsunami struck Southeast Asia in December of 2004, Klein says, he worked with his CNN international counterpart, and “We gang-tackled the story. We asked correspondents not to do standups but to find real human stories, to do storytelling.” He says that he quickly took note of Anderson Cooper’s talent for displaying empathy (Cooper replaced Aaron Brown in November 2005), and also decided that Dobbs’s program was fine as it was. “I committed ‘benign neglect’ on Lou,” Klein told me.

For some years, CNN has billed itself as “The most trusted name in news.” (A recent Pew poll, however, suggested that there is little difference in credibility among the cable news networks; the poll also noted that the number of Americans who said they believed “all or most” of what CNN reported has fallen from forty-two per cent to twenty-eight per cent since 1998.) Under Klein, CNN has, once again, placed greater emphasis on its chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, and given more airtime to John King, the chief national correspondent. After largely abandoning documentaries in recent years, the network plans to produce twenty-four hours in 2007; among the topics that the scheduled programs will cover are Iraq and the environment. After it became clear that CBS would choose Katie Couric to replace Dan Rather as anchor, Klein hired the CBS White House correspondent John Roberts, who had once been in contention for Rather’s job. He recruited Time’s Baghdad bureau chief, Michael Ware, as well as senior broadcast network-news producers: David Doss, formerly of ABC and NBC, to executive-produce Anderson Cooper; and Victor Neufeld, a veteran of CBS and ABC, to executive-produce Paula Zahn, who anchors the news at 8 P.M. He also replaced “Inside Politics” and the shouting match “Crossfire” with the more news-oriented “Situation Room.”

The showman in Klein competes with the newsman and, in the atmosphere of cable news, the showman often wins the contest. “There’s no question that Jon Klein wants more edge,” a senior CNN employee told me. “Klein is the most personality-driven manager we’ve had.” This employee respects Klein “as a leader” for returning the network to its news roots but worries that Klein is drawing the wrong conclusion from Dobbs’s improved ratings. “When we did the ‘Broken Government’ series,” the senior employee said, “in the first conference call he said, ‘I don’t want preconceived solutions, but, when you reach a conclusion, don’t be afraid to express it. I don’t want ‘He said, she said.’ ”

CNN’s news coverage coexists uneasily with its Dobbs-led populism. Among the viewers who are less than happy with the network’s current direction is Ted Turner, who told me, “CNN in the U.S. is quite a bit different than it was. They’ve gone more into emphasizing personality, and to some degree, particularly in the case of Lou Dobbs, they’ve encouraged him to promote himself and his own ideas to create a cult of personality to increase the ratings.” Turner paused for a moment before adding that Lou Dobbs is “a very talented newscaster, and he’s personally a friend of mine. Having said that, I personally think he’s gone too far inserting his opinions, for my taste.”

Dobbs often describes himself as “a kid who grew up poor” in rural Texas. He was the younger of two sons, born in September, 1945, in Childress (pop. 6,000), not far from Amarillo. His father was a partner in a small propane business, and his mother was a bookkeeper. When Lou was twelve, the propane business collapsed and the family, in search of a better livelihood, moved to a farm in Rupert, Idaho, where Lou attended public schools. His teachers encouraged him to apply to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1967, with a degree in economics.

His first job was working in federal anti-poverty programs in Boston and Washington, D.C. Dobbs recalls, “I decided to go out and make some money. I decided I wasn’t changing the world.” He then moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a cash-management specialist for Union Bank, earning what was then an excellent salary of thirty thousand dollars a year to come up with ways for companies to manage their capital more efficiently. In 1969, he married a former high-school sweetheart; in 1970, the first of their two sons was born. But Dobbs grew restless at the bank, particularly after spending time with two friends who were journalists, and who, he says, “seemed to be having so much fun.” He had been saving money, and moved his family to Yuma, Arizona, where he’d heard about a job as a police and fire reporter for a radio station. His imposing physical presence and booming voice had been quickly noticed, and he soon began working with the affiliated television station. “I found what I really loved to do,” he says. His starting salary was seventy-five dollars a week. In the mid-seventies, he was hired as a television anchor-reporter, first in Phoenix and then in Seattle. At the end of 1979, a recruiter called to ask if he would be interested in the all-news cable network that Ted Turner was starting. Dobbs liked the idea of challenging the three broadcast networks, and Turner hired him to anchor a half-hour business newscast. On the Chicken Noodle Network, as CNN was sometimes called then, Dobbs was the youngest anchor. He is the only one from that period who is still with CNN.

Dobbs soon became a member of the network’s executive committee, and eventually supervised a staff of more than three hundred, overseeing all of CNN’s business coverage. He was also put in charge of business news on CNN.com, and became the president of CNNfn, a business cable network. His main job, however, was to anchor the half-hour “Moneyline” program, which in 1984 moved to New York. In 1998, it was given an additional half hour, and renamed the “Moneyline News Hour with Lou Dobbs,” allowing Dobbs to offer a wider range of reports.

Dobbs’s personal life had undergone a few changes during these years. In 1981, he divorced his wife. The following year, he married Debi Lee Segura, a sports anchor and a reporter for CNN; in 1988, Segura gave birth to twin girls. Dobbs bought his farm in Sussex, New Jersey, a ninety-minute commute to CNN’s studios in Manhattan, where he raised and rode horses, joined a country club, and collected guns. (His two sons, both businessmen, live in nearby Sparta; his daughters were recently accepted at Harvard.)

On the air, Dobbs celebrated capitalism and helped conjure the Internet bubble of the nineties. In the 2000 book “The Fortune Tellers,” Howard Kurtz wrote that “Moneyline,” like CNBC’s “Squawk Box” and much of the financial press, sought “a nonstop flow of tips, touts, picks, and pans to lure consumers with the idea that they just might get in on the Next Big Thing.” CNN billed “Moneyline” as the business-news program watched “by more C.E.O.’s than any other,” and its audience was so demographically desirable that CNN was able to charge advertisers some of the steepest cost-per-thousand rates in television.

MAD AS HELL
by KEN AULETTA
(page 2 of 3)
Dobbs flew on a private plane and befriended the well-to-do—among them Henry Kravis, the billionaire and leverage-buyout specialist. He accepted speaking fees to appear at corporate retreats. He was paid to do promotional videos for Shearson Lehman Brothers, Paine Webber, and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, and when these relationships became public and Dobbs was asked if this wasn’t a conflict of interest, he said, “That is a silly, silly question. Would I do it if I thought I were compromising anything?” Nevertheless, Dobbs said that he would return the money, and insists that his practice today is to donate such fees to charity. Tom Johnson, the chairman and C.E.O. of CNN News Group, expressed full confidence in Dobbs.

Inside CNN, Dobbs was known for his intelligence as well as for having a nasty streak. There were stories of how he verbally abused people, including the time, reported by Howard Kurtz, that he was said to have ordered a short producer to stand on a chair so that he—Dobbs is six-feet-two—could scream at him standing eyeball to eyeball. “It’s absolute bullshit,” Dobbs says. “It never happened,” although he concedes that he was “a very tough editorial manager.”

Dobbs met his volatile match in Rick Kaplan, who became CNN’s U.S. president in 1997, and by 1999 the two were barely speaking. Dobbs was leery of Kaplan, who had been a news producer at CBS and the executive producer of both “World News Tonight” and “Nightline,” at ABC, but who also happened to be a friend of President Clinton’s. “I didn’t agree with the journalism he was doing,” Dobbs said. “In my judgment, he was clearly partisan. He was pushing Clinton stories.” Kaplan responded by saying that most of CNN’s Clinton stories were negative. He thought that Dobbs was a prima donna—“just a very difficult person to deal with.” He added, “Lou doesn’t think he’s opinionated. He just thinks he’s stating the truth.”

Their final clash came in May of 1999, while Dobbs was anchoring “Moneyline.” CNN, like Fox and MSNBC, had planned to cover a speech that Clinton was giving in Littleton, Colorado, after the shootings at Columbine High School, where two teen-age gunmen killed twelve students and a teacher, and then committed suicide. Clinton’s speech fell in the middle of Dobbs’s program, and the broadcast cut away to Colorado. Kaplan was watching at home and heard Clinton say to the families, “There’s something you all can do,” and then the President was cut off and CNN returned to “Moneyline.” Dobbs says that he considered the President’s speech a staged event, and ordered his producer to return to the studio. Kaplan told me, “Tell me what journalistic reason there was not to cover the President at Columbine soon after the shootings? Everyone else was covering it. . . . There are two sides to almost every story in the world, but not to that one.” Kaplan countermanded Dobbs’s order, and Dobbs, at that point, looked into the camera and told his audience, “CNN President Rick Kaplan wants us to return to Littleton.”

Several days later, Dobbs announced that he was leaving CNN to start a Web site, Space.com, devoted to collecting news about space: technology, astronomy, NASA missions, and more; a co-investor in this effort was Venrock Associates, the venture-capital firm affiliated with the Rockefeller family. “I’d had it,” Dobbs says. “I just couldn’t take the hassle. I was not having fun.” There was another, unspoken reason for his departure: Dobbs wanted to stay on the air at CNN while also investing in Space.com, and CNN officials believed that this would entail a clear conflict of interest. How could he objectively cover the dot-com world when he had a stake in its success? Ted Turner could not persuade Dobbs to back down, and he quit.

Dobbs had other reasons to be unhappy: CNBC, the NBC business cable network, was building an audience throughout the day, and by evening it often had more viewers than “Moneyline.” Many C.E.O.s now appeared first on CNBC. Maria Bartiromo, a reporter whom Dobbs had declined to make a correspondent, and who had been given her own show on CNBC, was drawing a large audience. Dobbs was annoyed that Time Warner, CNN’s corporate parent, had refused to invest more in CNNfn. Dobbs became the C.E.O. of Space.com, and soon signed on with NBC to produce a financial newsletter, host an NBC radio program, and become a “guest” financial commentator on both NBC and CNBC, apparently allowing him to skirt a non-competitive clause in his severance agreement. At CNN, meanwhile, “Moneyline” continued, but it was slowly losing viewers.

By April, 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst and Rick Kaplan had left CNN. That month, Dobbs announced that he was ending his association with NBC, stepping down as the C.E.O. of Space.com, and returning to CNN to be the anchor and managing editor of “Moneyline.” Dobbs says, “I never dreamed I’d miss news. I watched the 2000 coverage of the Presidential campaign, and it drove me nuts not to be able to report that story. CNN approached my agent to bring me back.” Jeff Gralnick, the executive producer whom Dobbs had recruited to “Moneyline,” in 1999, had a somewhat different version of events. In Electronic Media in May of 2001, Gralnick wrote that because of new competition from CNBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and Bloomberg News, Dobbs’s comeback “is dicey, and achieving success has to be seen as problematic. . . . So why would Dobbs abandon what appeared to be his growing relationship with CNBC and NBC?” Gralnick mentioned the temptation of a high salary, but his conclusion was that “anyone who knows Dobbs or has competed against him or crossed him knows there has to be more to this than just the dollars. Dobbs’ return to CNN in the role of ‘savior’ is the ultimate gotcha.” (Today, Dobbs is paid about six million dollars a year by CNN for his TV work and a weekly column that he writes for CNN.com. Space.com never became an Internet triumph, but it remains alive. Gralnick has since become a consultant for NBC News, among others, on new media.)

At first, the impact of Dobbs’s return on the program was slight. The ratings for “Moneyline” went up only slightly. Dobbs says that his new, more aggressive tone was prompted by a series of events: corporate scandals (Enron, M.C.I., Adelphi, Tyco); tax cuts that Dobbs felt benefitted the rich at the expense of the middle class, and also generated enormous budget deficits; and, above all, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. After September 11th, Dobbs began wearing a flag pin on his lapel; other changes came gradually.

Dobbs and his producers agreed that the C.E.O. interviews were too soft. “We were doing—I don’t want to say puff pieces—but we were just scratching the surface,” Jim McGinnis, who has worked with Dobbs for two decades, says. They noticed that their e-mails spiked every time they did pieces on jobs going overseas or on illegal immigration. They began talking about adding more edge to the program. “I was determined to drive the broadcast very hard on issues that affect the quality of life of most Americans,” Dobbs says. As the managing editor, he already enjoyed editorial control. He decided that he also needed more freedom to express his views, and says that he went to Jim Walton, the president of CNN Worldwide, who agreed to relax the network’s no-opinion strictures. “Take it as far as you want,” he says that Walton told him, although viewers had to be informed at the beginning of the program that it would include opinion. Walton confirms this conversation. Opinion is fine, he told me, “if it’s clearly labelled. One of the things our critics said years ago was that CNN is the same”—boring. What Dobbs is doing demonstrates that “CNN is not the same.”

Five correspondents work for Dobbs, and during the second half hour they usually report on a story that Dobbs treats as a scandal, and that he invariably describes as “outrageous,” “alarming,” “idiotic,” “disgusting,” or “sickening.” On the air, Dobbs’s reporters appear deferential. On August 16th, Christine Romans filed a report describing how the town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, “decided to fight illegal immigration itself” by fining landlords a thousand dollars a day for knowingly renting to illegal aliens and by denying business permits to companies that hire them. In an interview with an A.C.L.U. official who opposed the law, she allowed him a single on-camera sentence; the mayor, who supported the measure, had seven lines and the last word. In a colloquy with Romans in the studio, Dobbs was told that the A.C.L.U. said that if voters were unhappy with federal laws they could always vote for new members of Congress. “Why doesn’t that apply, then, to the local community,” Dobbs asked, “and why are they interfering there, I wonder?”

“That’s a very good point, Lou,” Romans said.

On September 12th, Lisa Sylvester reported from rural Taneytown, Maryland, where the town council was debating whether to legislate English as the official language. Two people who favored the proposal were interviewed, and only one opponent. Dobbs, betraying impatience with those who were opposed to such legislation, said, with a smirk, “As we can often say on this broadcast with seemingly greater frequency, ‘Only in America.’” On October 2nd, the correspondent Casey Wian began his report from California, “Lou, there are an estimated seven million illegal aliens now working in the United States. Neither they nor their employers have much to worry about in Congress’s latest efforts to secure the border.” Wian interviewed two critics of corporations who hire illegal aliens and said that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce “refused to provide” a rebuttal, but its Web site says that new regulations would unduly burden employers and would either be “unworkable or cost too much money.” Dobbs thanked Wian and concluded the segment by saying that most lobbyists in Washington try to keep everyone from being “overly burdened; that is, everyone except working men and women and their families in this country.” CNN’s regular correspondents often appear during the first half hour, but not always comfortably. Two days after the midterm elections, at the conclusion of a report from John King, Dobbs looked into the camera and said that he hoped the public had finally “had a bellyful of wedge issues.”

“We can hope, John, can’t we?” Dobbs said.

“We sure can, Lou,” King said, looking uneasy.

The changed emphasis of the program was probably brought about by a mixture of conviction and commerce. With so many choices, McGinnis observes, “there’s a blur out there. If you don’t stand for something and people don’t see what you are, you’re passed by. . . . It’s a business.” By May, 2002, the anniversary of Dobbs’s return, the “Moneyline” ratings had doubled. A year later, the title of the program was changed to “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” When he was asked to describe his ratings success, Dobbs, anticipating skepticism, said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I don’t pay a lot of attention to the numbers. I can tell you the trend is up.”

Dobbs’s actual politics are not easily categorized, and his book, like his nightly program, contains opinions that are both satisfying and infuriating to the right and the left. On Dobbs’s office wall is a framed drawing with a note from Kurt Vonnegut: “You, as the only big-time television personality capable of not only feeling but experiencing sorrow for American working stiffs, are our hero.” The left, to which Vonnegut belongs, can embrace Dobbs for his opposition to big corporations and his support for a higher minimum wage, national health insurance, and abortion rights. The right likes him for his views on immigration, political correctness, gun control, the United Nations, and all efforts to limit American sovereignty. Dobbs believes that the middle class, which he has described as being composed of two hundred and fifty million Americans, is taken for granted, an argument that could be challenged by those who point to the growth of middle-class entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare, or to the unwillingness of elected officials to offend this constituency by curbing entitlements.

Although Dobbs opposes gun control and supports a woman’s right to an abortion, he calls these fake “wedge issues” designed “to excite a certain base.” He opposes holidays that celebrate a group rather than a nation, and on his program last spring, when a Hispanic-rights activist defended the displaying of the Mexican flag as an expression of ethnic pride, like that exhibited on St. Patrick’s Day, he told her, “Let’s be clear. I don’t think there should be a St. Patrick’s Day.”

Dobbs sometimes seems oddly formal; he does not roll up his sleeves, and he puts on a jacket when he leaves his office area. In conversation, he does not harbor much doubt. One day, in his fifth-floor office at CNN’s Columbus Circle headquarters, I mentioned that Henry Kissinger has said that many of the decisions he made as Secretary of State were sixty-forty choices, meaning that the opposing argument could claim forty per cent of the truth. Did the “rock hard” truths that Dobbs once told me he believed in exclude the possibility that the other side could claim twenty per cent, or even forty per cent, of the truth?

“In free trade?” he said. “In illegal immigration? In education? No. Everything I believe, I believe unequivocally.”

Bill Tucker, a correspondent, has worked with Dobbs for twenty-three years. “There are a lot of dumb bastards in the world,” Tucker told me. “Lou is one of the smart ones. There’s a big difference working for someone who is smart and engaged.” On some issues, Dobbs’s program has taken strong positions, Tucker acknowledged, adding that the reporters who work for Dobbs “are expected to file reports within that editorial point of view. The opinions are left to Lou.” The correspondents try to get all sides, Tucker went on, but on many of the stories “the quote unquote other side often makes it difficult, because they don’t want to coöperate if they know I’m with Dobbs.”




MAD AS HELL
by KEN AULETTA
(page 3 of 3)
One of Jon Klein’s stated aims has been to persuade the producers of CNN’s various programs to widen their vision (he speaks of them climbing out of their “silos”)—to make sure that, say, when Anderson Cooper travelled to Africa other CNN programs, from “The Situation Room” to Paula Zahn’s broadcast, would welcome his reports. Yet the dispatches filed by Dobbs’s correspondents are rarely welcomed. The senior CNN employee says that “other shows are not comfortable with them,” because too many of these reports are on Dobbs’s pet subjects and the reporters are widely perceived to be Dobbs’s acolytes, feeding him the alarming news that he wants.

“I think he’s the most influential political reporter of the time, certainly over the last year,” Klein told me. “He’s someone politicians ignore at their peril.” Klein cited Dobbs’s response to the Dubai ports deal: for fifteen evenings, Dobbs spoke about “the outrage” of allowing a Middle Eastern country “with ties to the September 11 terrorists” to operate six American ports. Dobbs certainly was not the only person to raise questions, but the resulting furor eventually prompted Dubai to abandon the plan. Slate recently wrote that Dobbs’s brand of economic nationalism had been reinforced by the results of the midterm elections, in which many Democrats expressed Dobbsian viewpoints. As for the “illegal immigration” story, Dobbs provided a nightly stage for like-minded members of Congress to express their opinions, an exposure that he believes helped to shift Congress’s agenda. Dobbs became so closely identified with the issue that it prompted the humorist Andy Borowitz to offer this fake news story:

In his toughest stand yet against illegal immigration, President George W. Bush today announced that he would move CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs to the United States’ border with Mexico.
For Mr. Bush, who one day earlier had announced that he was moving 10,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border, the decision to dispatch Mr. Dobbs means that the deployment of Guard troops was no longer necessary.


Dobbs’s program also features letters that usually echo his views, as well as poll questions that appear to be slanted, such as “Do you believe illegal aliens who have anchor babies in the United States should be immune from deportation?” In August, ninety-three per cent of those who were asked this question opposed granting immunity. When two U.S. border agents were convicted for shooting at an unarmed man who was smuggling more than seven hundred pounds of marijuana across the Mexican border, Dobbs was incensed. (A jury had found the agents guilty of various counts of assault, among other charges, for firing fifteen shots at the man.) Dobbs returned to this story in many broadcasts. He solicited contributions for the agents. In an August 16th report, he entertained the possibility that “somebody is paying off the government of Mexico” to protect the drug smuggler. He pressed the president of the National Border Patrol Council by asking, “Why isn’t there more of a show of support from your members and for other Border Patrol officers?” He inserted the issue into his poll, asking, How many viewers thought this was “a travesty of American justice?” Ninety-six per cent of Dobbs’s viewers agreed that it was an outrage.

Dobbs’s rabidness provokes his critics. Not long ago, the Times columnist Thomas Friedman told a law-school audience, “And then you have a blithering idiot like Lou Dobbs, in my view, who’s using the platform of CNN in a news frame. . . . This is not news. And so we have a political class not making sense of the world for people and that’s why the public . . . is so agitated.” The Economist said that one might expect “CNN’s flagship business-news programme . . . to strive for economic literacy,” but, instead, Dobbs greets “every announcement of lost jobs as akin to a terrorist assault”; The Nation accused him of “hysteria and jingoism”; the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Dobbs “failed to present mounting and persistent evidence of anti-Hispanic racism” in his reports on anti-immigration groups like the Minutemen; one Hispanic group urged Time Warner to take Dobbs off the air.

In his new book, Dobbs says of Friedman, “His name calling would bother me more if he were anything more than a tool of international corporatism and a card-carrying member of his own Flat Earth Society.” In a weekly column for CNN.com, Dobbs wrote:

I will tell you it does make a fellow think when attacked so energetically and so personally. But in none of the attacks on my position on outsourcing has a single columnist or news organization seen fit to deal with the facts.
Number one: We’re not creating new jobs in the private sector, and that’s never happened before in our history. . . . Number two: We haven’t had a trade surplus in this country in more than two decades, and our trade deficit continues to soar. Number three: We’ve lost three million jobs in this country over the last three years. . . . That seems to me, at least, to be more than sufficient evidence for all of us.


Some journalists at CNN worry that Dobbs harms the network’s credibility. John King says that he likes Dobbs and admires his talent, but adds, “Lou clearly has strongly held beliefs, and he’s decided to share these beliefs. In doing that, does it sometimes cause concern in the company? Yes.” Klein admits that he wants to “increase the audience’s intensity,” but not in the way he believes that Fox has. “They have a clear brand identity,” he says of Fox, “which does not afford them as many places to go when their viewership dips. They have a definite right-of-center view of the world. Most of their hard-core viewers are older; sixty-five-plus is their median age”—CNN’s median age is about sixty-one. “When you define yourself that way, it’s very hard to move to the center without alienating the core audience. I’d rather be playing our hand now. By focussing on news, there is much more we can do.” In response to Klein’s remarks, a senior Fox executive called him hypocritical for saying that he was pushing serious news, when, according to the executive, he was still running soft news and taking CNN “on a hard tack to the left.” The executive said of Dobbs, “He has tapped into strong opinion. He’d be good on Fox.”

Klein’s immediate goals include boosting the ratings of CNN’s “American Morning,” which has gained viewers but badly trails “Fox and Friends.” (CNN’s morning program attracts about half a million viewers; NBC’s “Today,” the leader among the broadcast networks, reaches six million.) And Klein must give some thought to a replacement for Larry King, who is seventy-three, when King retires. “There isn’t going to be another Larry King,” Klein says. “And it’s not clear that we’ll have another interview show.” There has been published speculation that he might make a bid for Diane Sawyer, the co-anchor of “Good Morning America,” who is eager to escape morning television and seems now to be blocked from an anchor chair at ABC, CBS, or NBC. Klein appears interested; they worked together at CBS. “She has a lot of attributes that would help her fit into CNN,” he says. She also has a salary of about twelve million dollars, which CNN could not easily justify for a program whose audience is so much smaller.

CNN’s challenge is how to balance its credibility with the emotive direction of cable news. “If you’re going to fill 24/7, you have to look for other angles after the basic facts,” Rick Kaplan, who, until June, was the president of MSNBC, said. Ted Turner takes a different view. He believes that traditional television news, like print media, is at risk. “We’re moving into a ‘Brave New World,’ like Huxley,” Turner says, with “a dramatic reliance on wireless.” Turner believes that “somebody has to gather the news,” and that CNN has held “the high ground.” He remembers that, when he started CNN, it was said that the public didn’t want twenty-four-hour cable news. “I certainly hope they are able to maintain its position as the world’s most important and trusted network,” he told me. “That’s a hell of an important position to have. If CNN does keep its quality image above all the temptations to become more ‘edgy,’ I think they have a very bright future. If they go over the line too far, they risk losing their pole position.”

Turner recently criticized journalists who fail to convey a sense of “covering the news from an unbiased” perspective. Turner didn’t single anyone out, but Dobbs is sure that he was referring to him. Dobbs says that his old friend and former boss “is an American citizen, and he has a right to say what he thinks,” but he rejects the journalistic “neutrality” advocated by Turner. According to Dobbs, viewers expect him to take positions, and like his program because he draws attention to issues that are often ignored by the mainstream press. “I hope that every time the government lies, our broadcast grabs them by the scruff of the neck,” he says.

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