Lou Dobbs

From Philosopedia

Lou Dobbs (24 September 1945 - )

Dobbs is the CNN anchor and managing editor for Lou Dobbs Tonight, a television program that attracts CNN's second-largest audience after Larry King Live, with about 800,000 viewers per night.

The son of a co-owner of a propane business and bookkeeper in Childress, Texas, he and his family moved when he was twelve to Rupert, Idaho. He attended Minico High School in Minidoka County, serving as student body president in 1963. In 1967, he earned a degree in economics from Harvard University.

He worked in Boston and Washington, D.C., for federal anti-poverty programs and in Los Angeles as a cash-management specialist for Union Bank. In Yuma, Arizona, he was a police and fire reporter or KBLU-AM. By the mid-1970s he was a TV anchor and reporter in Phoenix, then joined Seattle's KING-TV.

In 1980, Dobbs served as CNN's chief economics correspondent and hosted its business news program Moneyline, becoming a corporate executive for CNN. After clashing with Rick Kaplan for his allegedly being "a very difficult person to deal with," Dobbs started Space.com, but in 2001 he returned to CNN where he is known as a controversial reporter who is isolationist, disapproves of the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign lands, and is against illegal immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens.

Once described by MSNBC as a "lifelong Republican," he frequently includes in his news programs how disgraceful he finds the George W. Bush administration is. As a result, during his Lou Dobbs Tonight program he has described himself as an unaffiliated independent populist who no longer supports any of the political parties.

Christopher Hitchins, in a Variety Fair article (September 2007), describes meeting Dobbs:

May 3, New York City: To the Lou Dobbs show, on CNN-Mr. Middle America at prime time. Mr. Dobbs displays a satirical paragraph from my book, about the number of virgin births that all religions have always claimed. He tells me off-air that he quit Sunday school as a very small boy, and that he's raised all his children without religion.