Now That Dobbs is Out, Who’s Next on the List?

By Manuel Ballagas.

CNN did itself no favor recently by caving in to the world-without-borders crowd and pulling the plug on Lou Dobbs. A cabal of self-appointed Latino advocates and left-leaning media censors had decried Dobbs’ stance against illegal immigration for almost a year, accusing him of spreading “hate” and “lies” against Hispanics, and threatening CNN with a boycott. It seems they got what they wanted.

By all accounts, however, Dobbs’ departure means CNN will be losing not only an outspoken critic of illegal immigration, but also a sizeable piece of the primetime audience at a moment when, like most cable news channels, it cannot afford to lose many viewers. Competitor MSNBC –whose sister company Telemundo helped to peddle the anti-Dobbs diatribes to the Hispanic audience- must be elated.

Even if it trailed behind the Fox Report at 7 pm, Dobbs’ show put up a healthy fight in the primetime segment with MSNBC’s Hardball. According to the web site tvbythenumbers.com, Lou Dobbs Tonight turned up in third place on the very night the commentator announced his resignation, supposedly to pursue “advocacy journalism” elsewhere. Of the nearly 2 million viewers CNN had in primetime, about 800,000 tuned in to Dobbs. Not bad for a “hate monger”.

So, what going on? Could it be that CNN seriously believed that nixing Dobbs would result in a surge of the elusive Hispanic audience? If that’s the case, the Most Trusted Name in News is in for a big surprise. Being the captive viewers of Univision and Telemundo, undocumented aliens hardly get their news from English-language TV. And the organizations that spearheaded the effort to get Dobbs fired are virtually unknown among Hispanic citizens or legal residents, whose TV viewing habits they would be hard pressed to influence.

Yet the effort to bring Dobbs down through intimidation and slander clearly goes beyond the commentator himself and his views on illegal immigration –or his ratings, for that matter. Since it played so well with the Obama Administration’s recent attempts to demonize and stifle dissenting voices in the media, it wouldn’t be so far-fetched to ask who’s next in the crosshairs of both the Fascist Left and White House.

With operations such as Media Matters, the Center for Media Justice, and Reclaim the Media involved with both the Drop Dobbs and Basta Dobbs campaigns, it’s easy to assume the open assault on freedom of expression will not stop at the gates of CNN. It will most likely move on to other venues unpopular among the radicals and this Administration. As New York’s left-leaning Diario La Prensa put it in a gleeful editorial, “Now, we’re off to get [Glenn] Beck and [Bill] O’Reilly.”

How nice. Even Democrat US Senator Bob Menéndez felt obliged to rejoice at Dobb’s deportation from the airwaves. “It’s addition by subtraction,” he said. Not too bad for a Jon Corzine acolyte, but quite puzzling coming from a Cuban-American who should know first hand the hard consequences of suppressing opponents’ points of view and threatening free speech. After all, Fulgencio Batista’s and Fidel Castro’s dictatorships are the reasons why Menéndez was born in this great country, to begin with.

Of course, it’s easier said than done. Fox News’ general audience has grown exponentially in the face of the increasingly liberal “mainstream media”. Hispanics are no exception. A Pew Research Center survey of 2008 among almost 4,000 participants showed 50 per cent of the Hispanics watched Fox News regularly (21%) or sometimes (29%). According to the same survey, 28 per cent of Hispanics participants watched The O’Reilly Factor’s either regularly or sometimes. Four years before, that figure was 22 per cent.

So, will these Hispanics be disenfranchised too by the world-without-borders crowd for tuning in to the “enemy airwaves”? Will all commentators and news channels be required from now on to pass some kind of opinion litmus test to remain in the air? Considering the audience that’s at stake, it is doubtful any respected media venue will cave in to further attempts at intimidation –even the very liberal ones. To be sure, very few would be ready to shoot themselves in the foot, as CNN did.

That said, it’s a sad day in this country when suppression of free speech is so publicly celebrated both by a newspaper and an American lawmaker; sadder still, when it is done in the name of Hispanic immigrants.

Manuel Ballagas is a media consultant.

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