“How Can They Let Him Keep Beating This Dead Horse?… It’s Outrageous”

An article in the Aug. 28 edition of The Nation examines Lou Dobbs‘ “increasingly hard-line, restrictionist view” of immigration. It includes a number of juicy anonymous quotes. A “senior former Dobbs staffer” says many at CNN find Dobbs’ views deeply offensive: “At first people said, ‘How can they let him keep beating this dead horse? There’s no even-handedness; it’s outrageous.’ But now, people have become so desensitized to it all. Then again, if you want to stand on your soapbox about journalistic integrity, where are you going to go?”

And a “former CNN news staffer from an overseas bureau” says whenever Dobbs’ producers contacted the bureau for stories, “they would request stories that would fit their agenda… We wanted to provide a balanced view. But people on Dobbs’s show would look at the script and ask for changes. If we gave too much of a balanced view, they would kill the story.”

So why does Dobbs still have a show? Because he’s a cash cow for CNN, one of the anonymous ex-staffers asserts…