An American Lion

Lou Dobbs

When you surprise everyone and quit in a huff, all you’re doing is telling your next employer that things aren’t going to work out with them, either:

Lou Dobbs, the longtime CNN anchor whose anti-immigration views have made him a TV lightning rod, said Wednesday that he is leaving the cable news channel effective immediately.

Sitting before an image of an American flag on his television set, he said “some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem solving as well as to contribute positively to the great understanding of the issues of our day.”

“I’m considering a number of options and directions,” Mr. Dobbs added. A transcript of his remarks is available here.

My guess is that Fox Business News will add Dobbs, keep him there for a year or less, and he’ll quit in a huff and go bother someone else for a job. He will go back to CNN at some point, sooner than later if the current CNN management is forced out, and they will want him back when they realize that people with his kind of sizzle don’t really exist anymore (Lou Dobbs and sizzle are synonymous by the way). There’s no “farm system” in broadcasting anymore. Local news outlets aren’t producing journalists, they’re producing hosts who introduce clips produced by agencies that are syndicated out. The same anchors in Birmingham, Phoenix and Detroit are introducing the same bland material their stations can barely afford.

The reactions are less than generous:

Lou Dobbs has long been a rarity on the cable news scene: an angry old paranoid white guy who yells a lot and gets stuff wrong. Given the Harsh Discrimination the Liberal Media inflicts upon angry old paranoid white guys who yell a lot and get stuff wrong, it’s amazing that Dobbs even had a teevee show in the first place. His was an Important Voice: an angry, old, paranoid, loud, inaccurate, white voice, practically the only one on the airwaves, except for all the other ones.

And now Lou Dobbs has been fired! Oh yeah, right, he “resigned.” Ha! AS IF. NewsBusters, as always, asks the hard-hitting questions:

Has Lou Dobbs been forced out at CNN by the left-wing attack machine and other liberal forces? Quite possibly.

Quite definitely!!!! It is for sure!!!!!! There are not enough exclamation points in the world to prove how for sure it is!!!!!!!! (Have you noticed, by the way, how Mexicans keep stealing honest hardworking American exclamation points and turning them upside down? And how they do the SAME THING WITH QUESTION MARKS? If the Mexicans can sneak into Our country and invert punctuation, tell me they’re not powerful enough to get Lou Dobbs canned. The logic here is inescapable.)

If you’re ideologically opposed to Dobbs, of course you’re going to use too many exclamation points. This wasn’t a graceful exit. Someone held the door open and Dobbs ran through it, leaving papers to settle behind him. Chortling about it is to be expected.

I don’t know if I would compare this to the end of Tom Tancredo’s political career:

Tom Tancredo left the U.S. House of Representatives.  Now, we have lost another one our biggest sources of immigration news — at least for now.  The N.Y. Timesreports that “Lou Dobbs, the longtime CNN anchor whose anti-immigration views have made him a TV lightning rod, plans to announce Wednesday that he is leaving the network effective immediately, two network employees said.”

Dobbs also had given some credence to the birthers’ claim that President Obama was not born in the United States and thus is ineligible to be President.

Is Fox News in Lou Dobbs’ future?  Stay tuned!

UPDATE (Nov. 12):  Dobbs’ last CNN show was on November 11.  I watched the last 15 minutes, where Lou did a story on political correctness and the First Amendment and defended himself to his immigration critics.  The defense resembled what appears on his website (see below) (and appears to have been posted early this morning).

Hereis a CNN story about his departure and a video of his on-the-air announcement.  Lou will still have a radio show and his own (www.loudobbs.com) website.  On that website, Lou, among other things, attempts to rebut the criticisms of his immigration rants by “ethnocentric special interest groups.”

Neither Tancredo nor Dobbs are in that “very well known” category. Neither have ever really seen their opposition to illegal immigration take off and become a viable means of being accepted into the hearts and minds of average Americans. Neither of them are hot properties. You could say that Tancredo is far more obscure, and is really off the radar now, but Dobbs wasn’t pulling in huge numbers. He was getting beaten by Fox and MSNBC in his time slot.

Here’s a far more likely scenario—when shown just how bad he was, in terms of attracting viewers, Dobbs was asked to change. He refused. Now he’s gone. So what? I don’t recall him being especially prescient or brilliant about business, or about the news in general. He is a muddler, like all the rest, telling us what we already know because he’s too afraid to give us an educated guess. He’s no where near as useless as Neil Cavuto, but who is?

I’ll tell you who could replace Dobbs, and that’s Fred Thompson:

Fred Thompson and his goatee

Fred won’t do it, of course, and he would have to shave his goatee and moustache (Is it for a movie part? Is it for a lady?), but he could certainly do a better job than Dobbs. The problem is, who wants to sit in a studio every day and react to the obvious?

UPDATE: And we have a winner:

John King is replacing Lou Dobbs on CNN.

John Klein, CNN president, said Thursday that veteran reporter King will move into the 7 p.m. EST slot that’s been vacated by Lou Dobbs. King will host a show about politics beginning early next year.

That puts him in direct competition with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, whose “Hardball” is also about politics. Fox News Channel’s Shepard Smith, who does a more general interest newscast, dominates the cable news ratings in that hour.

The wording on that is all wrong. King is going to hold down that time slot until his evident failure gives CNN the excuse to go out and find someone to take the job. I cannot believe there is a soul in America who is excited to see Dobbs replaced by someone named King, and I expect they’ll be crestfallen when they discover it’s not Larry King.