Yeah, what’s wrong with calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”?
The remarks were more than just a lifeline from a cable news stalwart to a Republican upstart in the midst of a cutthroat primary campaign. They related to immigration, the ideological mortar that bound the Fox News brain trust — guys like Dobbs, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson — to Trump. It was a partnership so robust that hosts such as Dobbs would dabble in whatever viral fantasies served Trump’s interests. Until, that is, the network aired way-out-there claims that two unheralded voting technology firms had abetted schemes to flip votes from Trump to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
That little miscue cost Fox $787.5 million in a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, which had filed a defamation suit against the network. Twelve of the 20 statements at the heart of the litigation were the work of Dobbs. Such is the archive that he leaves behind.
Perhaps no other figure better tracks the trend toward bitter partisanship in American politics and its reflection in the media. Dobbs was working at a Seattle television station when he fielded a recruitment appeal to work at Ted Turner’s Cable News Network (CNN) from its inception in June 1980. He came to personify the network’s business coverage, with the title of chief economic correspondent and anchor of the nightly show “Moneyline.” He later added managerial work to his reporting and anchoring duties, which he handled with little effort. Throughout his career, Dobbs was a comfy and gracious presence in his studio chair, prodding guests on the topics of the day, exchanging pleasantries and flashing an industry-leading smile.
In 1999, he clashed with his superiors at CNN when he instructed his crew to cut away from an address by President Bill Clinton in Littleton, Colo., following the Columbine school shooting. After he was overruled by his superiors, Dobbs declared on air, “CNN President Rick Kaplan wants us to return to Littleton.” He left the network that year but returned in 2001 for a stint in which he unfurled his anti-immigration positions, citing an “invasion of illegal aliens” — a term that he turned into a rhetorical mainstay — and spreading factually shaky attacks against immigrants, as noted in a 2019 Post profile by Manuel Roig-Franzia and Robert Costa. On a radio program, Dobbs embraced the false “birther” theory that Barack Obama wasn’t a U.S. citizen, presaging his later espousal of other conspiratorial notions. He left the network for good in 2009.
Dobbs’ accession to cable-news free agency came not long after MSNBC host Tucker Carlson saw his own show canceled. Fox News chief Roger Ailes hired them both to positions at the network, with Dobbs helming “Lou Dobbs Tonight” and Carlson serving in other roles until sliding into prime time in 2016. They provided Fox with a one-two punch for hating on immigrants, a stance fueled, in part, by the belief that they were harming job and wage prospects for middle-class Americans.
Dobbs, however, distinguished himself with his runaway sycophancy for Trump: In 2020, for instance, he posted a poll to Twitter asking whether the president’s leadership on covid-19 was “superb,” “great” or merely “very good.”
Yet the full extent of Dobbs’s die-hardism didn’t reveal itself until after Trump lost the 2020 election. Two days after that contest, Dobbs interviewed Trump insider Richard Grenell, pummeling him with questions about why he wasn’t doing more to challenge the election results. “This is Thursday. You were filing a legal action today against those fraudulent votes,” said Dobbs. “Has that been filed? Because you’re complaining about the press instead of telling us what you’re actually getting done.”
If only Dobbs had stuck to scolding fellow Trump supporters. Instead, he indulged the nonsense theory that the election had been stolen from Trump and laundered scandalous speculation that Dominion and Smartmatic, makers of electronic voting machines, were involved in the wrongdoing. “Our Presidential election came under massive cyber-attack orchestrated with the help of Dominion, Smartmatic, and foreign adversaries,” Dobbs tweeted in December 2020.
Subsequent debunking didn’t knock Dobbs off his talking points. In a March 2023 ruling in Dominion’s defamation case, Delaware Judge Eric M. Davis wrote, “Mr. Dobbs still believes the election was stolen.” A separate defamation suit from Smartmatic is still in litigation; it lists Dobbs as a defendant and cites his name 336 times. It was after the filing of this suit that Fox canceled Dobbs’s show.
His final stop in a wide-ranging media career was a podcast — “The Great America Show” — on iHeartRadio, a perch from which he’d rant about the misdeeds of alleged “Marxists” and, in a May episode, the alleged vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines. The episode’s title? “IS IT ALL RIGGED? ALL OF IT.” Dobbs had been exposed as a peddler of untruths, cited as a key player in false and damaging coverage, and otherwise devalued as an analyst of contemporary politics. Yet here he was, demonstrating that in 21st-century America, any old discredited propagandist can find himself a platform.
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