From the LA Times:

IT’S been a while since a major American news organization treated an important national issue as irresponsibly as CNN now does immigration.

Ever since Fox News took over the top spot in the cable news ratings, CNN has thrashed from one failed strategy to another…

The network’s one modest success story is Lou Dobbs. His shtick is to take a page from Fox’s playbook and retool the talk-radio sensibility for the tube. No real reporting, just lots of opinion aggressively presented with a recurring focus on the requisite obsession — in his case, illegal immigration and, to a lesser extent, what the correspondents on his nightly program have taken to calling “so-called free trade.”…

Last August, in an op-ed piece for the Arizona Republic, Dobbs wrote, “In the United States, an obscene alliance of corporate supremacists, desperate labor unions, certain ethnocentric Latino activist organizations and a majority of our elected officials in Washington works diligently to keep our borders open, wages suppressed and the American people all but helpless to resist the crushing financial and economic burden created by the millions of illegal aliens who crash our borders each year.”

Gosh, that is an obscene alliance, and who better to blow the whistle than a guy who has spent most of his television career spit-shining corporate boots?…

IT’S an arduous business being the only honest man in the room, but Dobbs is nothing if not dogged … “One of the things that frustrates many of us who care about our country and the truth,” Dobbs wrote on CNN’s website Friday, “is the rampant barrage of misinformation, disseminated by such vociferous special interests, whether they are ethnocentric social activists, labor unions, the Catholic Church or Corporate America. The truth is, advocates of amnesty, guest-worker programs and open borders are unconcerned about the 280 million American citizens, the men and women of this country who work for a living and their families.”

Thank God the American media finally has found a voice willing to champion working families against their traditional enemies: organized labor and the Catholic Church…

It’s odd, though, how these middle-class working men and women — denied Dobbs’ unshakeable grip on crystalline truth — seem to have much more complicated and nuanced views of immigration than he does. Thursday, for example, a national poll conducted by Pew Research Center and the Pew Hispanic Center found that the country is about evenly divided over immigration issues … That’s about what you’d expect to find about the sort of complex social, political and economic problem over which serious-minded people are likely to have serious differences…

Maybe they don’t watch CNN — or maybe they recognize self-interested demagoguery when they see it.

(Via Romenesko)

Technorati tags: Journalism, Spin, Media, Craven Demagogues