Why does CNN give a platform to Lou Dobbs to bash hispanics five days a week? Why does he overwhelmingly invite conservatives on his program? What kind of faux populism is this? And why do we have to put up with it?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has devised a cosmic plan wherein Lou Dobbs shall be the first talking head to actually have a head asplosion live due to excessive outrage levels.
Happy Cesar Chavez Day, California!
one of those spontaneous combustion moments so favored by Dickens! Wouldn’t that be something to see!!
I might even give in and buy a tv just for that.
be rest assured that said explosion will be immediately be reported as having “all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda.”
BooMan writes “And why do we have to put up with it?”
Sigh…
You DON’T have to put up with it.
Turn it OFF!!!
NEWSTRIKE!!!, goddammit.
AG
you’ve let them frame the issue.
mediaMoratorium
take back reality.
Yup.
It’s olds.
Your FATHER’S olds.
And NOTHING is staler than old news.
The beginnings of my whoie NEWSTRIKE!!! idea?
Way back in the middle of that oasis of prosperity and relative calm upon which we now fondly look back as “The Clinton Era” I got on a NYC bus one evening to go to a job. (At the Village Vanguard if that means anything to anybody here. Which it probably doesn’t because that sort of [lace and the sort of music that is pl;ayed in it are NOT covered by “The News”, being TRULY new every minute instead of a constant retread of what happened the day before the day before.) No one much on the bus…and there was a copy of Time magazine. Distractedly, I opened it and started skimming.
Israel, Palestine, the disease of the month, terrorists, Dems and Ratpubs, Russians and Chinese…the usual…
Until I got to a car ad and realized that the mag was about three years old.
“HMMMmmmm!!!”, he said.
“HMMMmmmm!!!”
Yup.
The Olds.
AG
and you story reminds me of something else.
About the end of 2002 we had to take pick up a friend from the hospital (she had gotten food-poisoning on a plane, and they took her from the airport to the hospital and she called us to come fetch her home).
While sitting in the waiting room I picked up a 2 year-old Readers Digest and while flipping through it I found an article called: “who is Osama bin Laden, and why does he want to kill us?”
on weekends. Lou is not to blame for this, he would bash Latin Americans 7 days a week if it were not for those agents and lawyers of his.
Later this week, Lou will be bashing Mexicans from sunny Cancun! Heads up to the kitchen staff down there, I know they’ll want to make sure he gets special treatment.
This is a very thoughtful piece by Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen about Democracy and how we perceive it. Link here.
my favorite part…
“Nelson Mandela describes how influenced he was, as a boy, by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the meetings that were held in his home town: “Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer.”
The other thing I really like about Sen is how he characterized the efficacy of a government and the society it purported to govern.
He said that it wasn’t so much the rights and liberties and protections provided in the laws of a government or a society that determined how well that society performed, but rather it is the degree to which the population has the capability of exercising those rights and freedoms that is themeasure of legitimate functionality in that government/society. Or, in simple terms, rights and laws are mere empty promises if one can’t implement them.
If one relflects on the US based on Sen’s perspective in this, it seems pretty clear that our much vaunted “constitutional democracy” actually only works for about 25% of the population at the expense of the other 75%.
rabies shots, if’n it’s not too late already.
Looked to me like he was about to have a stroke.
Dobbs is caught up in a circular, “broken record” sort of repetitive “psychotic episode” vis a vis his fears regarding the purity of “Legal America”.
Even prozac won’t help!
the Orange Empire — one of the top diaries is a complaint that the front pagers aren’t using the “Extended Copy” feature, meaning that other good front page diaries are drifting way down on the front page so people have to scroll too much to find them.
I would have referred them to here to show how “there’s more” can work well on a front page, but didn’t feel like being flamed (I’m in a shitty enough mood tonight, thanks to another household crisis involving the spouse).
The front page diaries here are a joy to peruse, and it’s not just because green is a more calming color than orange (my eyes needed to refocus after just a few minutes over there). Kudos to you and the current team… 🙂
And that made recommended!!! (Must really be BORED over there.)
No TV, problem solved.
What’s so tragic is that CNN’s international channel, which as far as I know is unavailable in the US, is ten times better. It has far better reporting, much less bias and almost none of the talk shows.
And on the weekends it broadcasts Stewart’s the Daily Show. How can you beat that?
Pax
I mean phased off US screens. At one time it was its own channel, then after the 911 events, it was relegated to midnight to 5 AM, then removed entirely, and recently the domestic audience is allowed to have one hour of international, from noon to one.
I agree that it is somewhat less of a crusade cheerleader than its domestic wing, and the other crusadenets, but that is sort of damning by faint praise. Still, even the smallest diversion from muted flag animations in banners and endless rewrites of Pentagon press releases delivered by Kira Philips is greatly appreciated.
Fascism demands scapegoats and distractions that boost xenophobia.
As a non-viewer of tv–the great American mind-programming appliance–I can only talk about what I’ve heard others say about Lou Dobbs.
Before this open thread, I only heard he was one commentator who spoke out repeatedly against the deficit and outsourcing.
Personally, I always suspected he was Ted Turner’s shoe salesman, and maintained Ted in the delusion that his shoe size was really a nine instead of an 8-1/2.
Rumor has it that one day when Ted’s feet were suffering acutely from toe/heel blister sydrome, he sat down in Lou’s shoe store and Lou ingeniously suggested Ted start wearing two pairs of socks to prevent slippage and friction.
“If the shoe doesn’t fit, get bigger feet!” Lou smiled at Ted. (Being the 4-star salesman he is, Lou also sold Ted a tube of Blistex.
That worked so well, Ted offered Lou the anchor job on Moneyline, and the rest is history.
When his name had become a household word, they asked Lou how he learned all his slick sales talk. He humbly replied, “Everything I know I learned from Rush Limbaugh.”
It just goes to show that even a lowly shoe salesman can move all the way up in the world with the right work ethic, connections, and cultural influences.
The last we heard Raw Story was breaking the news that Ted had persuaded Lou to move “all-the-way-up.” He was leaving tv and, beginning with the 3rd quarter of 2006, Lou would be projecting his face onto the moon for the broadcast of Moneyline every night, live. This way he could reach half the solar system in every broadcast. He could “hang out” with the stars, literally, and enjoy a stature unparalleled in broacast journalism history.
I’m particularly happy about it because I haven’t watched tv in such a long time, I have forgotten what Lou looks like. Now I can be programmed right along with the rest of America. Plus, if and when his head does explode, his “lunacy” will give the show a more universal impact.
YES LIBERALELITE!!!
Finally…someone with a sense of humor.
AG