Friday, August 7, 2009

Defending to the Death His Right to Say It

Lou Dobbs has accomplished quite a bit recently. Bill O'Reilly and the CNN US president defend him while Ann Coulter and liberals from organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center attack him.

Dobbs has reported from CNN since the inception of that network. At one point he concentrated on business matters, but now he has a prime time show. This program focuses on important, but little reported issues.

The birth certificate issue has gotten Dobbs in hot water with some and has led to liberal and left wing calls for his firing from CNN. Dobbs went on the record saying that he believed Obama was born in the United States, but he ran a story about the dissenters that apparently did not represent them as kooky lunatics. The outraged left fought back by trying to get CNN to fire him.

The fact is that this was not like the Dan Rather hatchet case against George W. Bush. The story focused upon those that dissented, it did not try to investigate the issue itself. Even then, so long as Dobbs and his team did not suppress vital information or lie outright, they are still well within the realm of professional journalism.

CNN has much to fear from dismissing or downgrading the sometimes prickly Dobbs. The more popular Fox News would love to have him, although fitting him into a good time slot would be an issue unless he worked for their business network. Dobbs also has a popular national radio show that could be used against CNN if they fired him.

Journalists need to step up for Dobbs. So what if his program reported on a genuine news story and stuck to basic facts? Liberals (remember their root word is supposed to be the same as liberty!) want Dobbs shoved off the air for ideological reasons, not factual, not professional, but ideological.

Fox News handled a controversy of its own when Glenn Beck referred to Obama as a racist due to his comments critical of police in the Gates arrest. He said that Obama may like white people, but also seems to have a problem with them. Fox News released a statement saying that its commentators have freedom to express their opinion "as with all commentators in the cable news arena." Could this have been a shot on behalf of Dobbs?

To his credit, Dobbs did not back off and apologize, but called his critics "limp minded, lily livered, lefty lemmings."

Now that is a man worth keeping around. Right CNN?

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