I am in the wrong damn business

November 16, 2009
By Billy Dennis

The New York Post is reporting that CNN paid Lou Dobbs $8 million to quit.

It seems that Dobbs, who embraced the birther movement and was spreading a bunch of misinformation about illegal immigration, was too much of an embarrassment for CNN.

It’s obvious that I picked the wrong business. I shouldn’t have dropped out of that radio and television production class I took at ICC about 25 years ago. If I had stuck with it, some company might be paying ME big bucks to take my nonsensical ramblings elsewhere.

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6 Responses to “ I am in the wrong damn business ”

  1. David P. Jordan on November 16, 2009 at 10:05 am

    was spreading a bunch of misinformation about illegal immigration

    You wanna be specific, Billy?

    • Billy Dennis on November 16, 2009 at 10:50 am

      Sure.

      As I made clear yesterday, Lou Dobbs of CNN is no relation to the Fact Checker. The CNN anchor has repeatedly made use of flawed statistics to fuel his anti-illegal immigrant campaign. His claim that illegal immigrants were responsible for introducing 7,000 new cases of leprosy into the country between 2002 and 2005 was grotesquely inaccurate. (The number of new leprosy cases discovered in 2006 was 137.) He was also way off the mark in saying that a third of the prison population is made up of illegal immigrants. (Immigrants, legal and illegal, account for about six per cent of the total prison population.)

      That said, however, there is no excuse for resorting to equally flawed data to attack Dobbs and his ilk. Statistics on hate crimes are easily checkable through the FBI website, and show nothing like the increase claimed by Obama. The most recent data available are for 2006, not 2007. As you can see from the following chart, hate crime offenses against Latinos rose from 529 in 2003 to 770 in 2006, a total increase over three years of about 45 per cent.

      So Obama isn’t exactly accurate, either.

      The people Dobbs brings on his show to support his thesis also are the source of a lot of misinformation.

      • David P. Jordan on November 16, 2009 at 12:31 pm

        Thanks, Billy.

        I’m not a Lou Dobbs fan, but I see his critics often wallow in misinformation as well. The worst offense is the inability to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration.

      • Billy Dennis on November 16, 2009 at 12:33 pm

        There are a ton of sites critical of Dobbs. I found one that is not run by partisans.

  2. SD on November 16, 2009 at 11:05 pm

    More specific to illegal immigrants would be undocumented people. I lived in the desert southwest many years and believe me the count is uncountable. And so is the damage these undocumented people do. I refuse to call them undocumented workers.

  3. AnotherExJSer on November 17, 2009 at 12:47 am

    They’re going to pay me $65 a month to drop cable.