The sleazy side of Lou Dobbs

Never mind his strident views on illegal immigrants that he masquarade as real news. We all know about that. What you might not know - and what was deftly uncovered by NYT columnist David Leonhardt - was Dobbs' claim that 7,000 cases of leprosy had been reported in the U.S. over the previous three years (with the clear implication that immigrants are to blame). When Lesley Stahl called him on it during a "60 Minutes" profile, Dobbs said, "Well, I can tell you this, if we reported it, it’s a fact." Well, of course it's not a fact. The 7,000 number covers the last 30 years, not the last three years, and there's no evidence of leprosy being a public health problem in the U.S. Dobbs claimed to have corrected the mistake by airing some other report. But that's another lie - the mistake has never been corrected.

Even yesterday, he spent much of our conversation emphasizing that there really were 7,000 cases in the leprosy registry, the government’s 30-year database. Mr. Dobbs is trying to have it both ways. I have been somewhat taken aback about how shameless he has been during the whole dispute, so I spent some time reading transcripts from old episodes of “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” The way he handled leprosy, it turns out, is not all that unusual. For one thing, Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.

How does he get away with all this? Simple - CNN, or more precisely Time Warner, keeps him on the air.