Letter of SPLC to CNN demanding Lou Dobbs be fired.
July 24, 2009
Jonathan Klein
President
CNN/U.S.
1 Time Warner Center
New York, N.Y. 10019-6038
Dear Mr. Klein,
As an important and respected news organization, CNN ha More..s a special responsibility to ensure the accuracy of its reporting. We have written to you before about our concern that Lou Dobbs repeatedly fails to live up to this standard in his reporting on immigration. Now, Mr. Dobbs is again trading in falsehoods and racist conspiracy theories, questioning President Obama’s American citizenship.
On the July 15 edition of “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” Mr. Dobbs questioned the official certificate provided by the president and the State of Hawaii and complained that President Obama has not made public the “original document.” On his radio program, Mr. Dobbs has repeatedly questioned the president’s fitness for office, demanding he “show the documents” and, at one point, jokingly suggesting President Obama may be “undocumented.”
The truth about the president’s birth is not in dispute. It has been verified by Factcheck.org, among many other serious news organizations, and his official birth documents have been made public. CNN itself has repeatedly reported on the falsity of the claims of the “birthers,” and the network’s esteemed legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, recently called those claims “a joke.” As you know, even Mr. Dobbs’ frequent fill-in anchor, Kitty Pilgrim, debunked the birthers on the July 17 edition of Mr. Dobbs’ own CNN show. The fact that Mr. Dobbs suggests otherwise on CNN ? while real CNN reporters telll the truth ? is both deplorable and an embarrassment to all serious journalists.
As he has in several other instances, Mr. Dobbs, in taking up the birthers’ claims, is adopting an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that originated on the radical racist right. As Gawker.com has reported, this particular conspiracy theory was first developed by an open anti-Semite and circulated by right-wing extremists who cannot accept the fact that a black man has been elected president of the United States. Among its adherents was neo-Nazi James von Brunn, the alleged murderer of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., this June. Von Brunn had helped spread the birthers’ claims on the Internet and attacked the “dishonest & conspiratorial Media” for not taking them up.
This is not the first time Mr. Dobbs has pushed racist conspiracy theories or defamatory falsehoods about immigrants. We wrote you in 2007 to bring to your attention his utterly false claim that 7,000 new cases of leprosy had appeared in the United States in a recent three-year period, due at least in part to immigrants.
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