| By Kay - Nov 12th, 2009 at 9:57 am EST |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Updates |
In a huge victory for groups that were part of the Basta Dobbs campaign, news broke yesterday that Lou Dobbs was airing his last program for CNN. The coalition, which includes Latino and netroots organizations, asked CNN to fire Dobbs for his xenophobic and offensive comments relating to immigrants.
Campus Progress has covered Dobbs in our "Know Your Right-Wing Ideologues" section recently:
Feeding Dobbs’s xenophobic flames are his guests, who often have troublesome connections. Twice in 2004, Dobbs hosted guest Glenn Spencer, who has close ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group that has described African-Americans as “a retrograde species of humanity.”
In 2008, Dobbs broadcast from the “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” conference in Washington, D.C. This conference was organized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a controversial anti-immigration organization whose founder, John Tanton, has made comments comparing immigrants to bacteria. Dobbs has frequently invited members of FAIR on his show, billing them as experts and citing them as reliable and objective sources. In fact, FAIR, along with two other leading anti-immigration groups, Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA, were all founded by Tanton.
Between 1982 and 1994, FAIR received $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a “not-for-profit foundation established in 1937 to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences.” According to documents obtained by Paul Lombardo of The Albany Law Review through Truman State University, the Pioneer Fund’s founding president, eugenicist Harry Laughlin, declared that “‘the great mass of defectiveness’ swelled by immigrants, the feebleminded, and children of racial intermixture would swamp America.” Laughlin has also argued for the legal definition of the “American Race.”
The removal of Dobbs, despite the fact that his contract was supposed to expire in 2011, is certainly good news for the groups that fought Dobb's racially distasteful comments. Still, I've been observing the media world long enough to know that pundits who are asked to resign in shame simply find homes on new networks.
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This is even more interesting when one looks into it.
The same vgroup that claims to be against immigration made a poster child of Elian Gonzalez and demonized Janet reno for upholding them.
talk about a double Standard!
Clifford Spencer
The Basta Dobbs campaign was a great example of the power of citizen organizing. Presente.org, who hosted the campaign, added tens of thousands of new members in just a few weeks and filled a void as a powerful, wired advocacy organization for Latino communities.
Let's learn from their leadership and keep this movement going!