Update: Today,
Media Matters launched its television ad calling on CNN to credibly
address its Lou Dobbs problem. CNN has repeatedly allowed Dobbs to
promote racially charged conspiracy theories about President Obama’s birth
certificate on his prime-time television show. You can watch the ad, set
to air this week on major news networks, here. Sign their petition over at DobbsConspiracy.com.
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Recently we reported on how CNN pundit Lou Dobbs was stirring up controversy over at “The Most Trusted Name in News” with the long-debunked claim that President Obama’s birth certificate is fake. Here’s the latest video roundup, in case you missed it:
Many organizations acted quickly to call out the conspiratorial claims. MoveOn.org demanded a public apology, the Southern Poverty Law Center called for CNN to take Dobbs off the air, and America’s Voice sent a letter to CNN’s president. As Greg Sargent reports:
The letter, from executive director Frank Sharry, is hard-hitting and worth quoting in full:
As America’s “Most Trusted Name in News,” CNN has a
responsibility to its viewers to provide commentary and analysis that
is substantive and accurate. However, those promoting conspiracy
theories about President Obama’s citizenship, the threat of leprosy
from immigrants and other falsehoods should be held accountable for
spreading misinformation.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich weighed in over the weekend in Small Beer,
Big Hangover:
One of the loudest birther
enablers is not at Fox but CNN: Lou Dobbs, who was heretofore best known for
trying to link immigrants, especially Hispanics, to civic havoc. Dobbs is
one-stop shopping for the excesses of this seismic period of racial transition.
And he is following a traditional, if toxic, American playbook. The escalating
white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more
than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration
of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American
work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist
panic.
