Video: It's Time to Drop Lou Dobbs

Posted by John V. Santore on Media Matters' County Fair blog

For years, Lou Dobbs has been one of the most dangerous hosts on cable news. He benefits enormously from the legitimacy of the CNN brand, which provides him with an unparalleled platform from which to mainstream the hate speech and racially charged conspiracy theories normally relegated to Fox News and other conservative news outlets. Dobbs calls himself an "advocacy journalist," but he doesn't even live up to that ambiguous standard. Good journalism enhances the discussion of serious topics, but Dobbs helps to undermine and debase that discussion, routinely infusing it with misinformation and fear. And when it comes to issues like immigration, he has more in common with birther Orly Taitz than with Anderson Cooper.

If CNN won't drop Dobbs, it's time that his advertisers did. It's time to do more than simply highlight the damage Dobbs does and the threat he poses. We must demand accountability from the advertisers who, by their purchase of airtime on his shows, actively support his hate speech.

Today, 11 organizations, including America's Voice, National Council of La Raza, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and many others, joined together to launch the Drop Dobbs campaign and DropDobbs.com. The effort aims to let companies know that their continued financial support of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight makes them complicit in the hate speech and wild conspiracy theories that he promotes.

The hugely successful Glenn Beck advertiser boycott currently under way shows how effective this kind of coordinated pressure can be. In just a matter of weeks, 62 companies have dropped Beck, costing the program 50 percent of its ad dollars. Companies simply don't want to be associated with Beck's on-air hate speech. They should feel the same way about Dobbs.

Watch the video, below. (To join the effort, click here.