Lou Dobbs, Daniel Schorr and Senator Joseph McCarthy

So is Lou Dobbs Tonight (on CNN) a show about immigration? Because that's his only topic every day and it's just starting to get sad. Don't people realize that he's just an old kook who is far too racist to be on television? At least Bill O'Reilly (of FOX NEWS) has other points, even if they are all Bush-esque, and he actually reads contrary opinions on his show. When Dobbs reads his letters, they are always somehow highly supportive of whatever point he is making. Now I'm always critical of American cable news networks for their utter lack of NEWS, but Dobbs and Abrams (of MSNBC) are even more painful because of their utter lack of attention to actual issues. The Abrams report is (thankfully) no longer on the air, but not because Abrams was fired for having Natalee Holloway stories for a year, but because he was PROMOTED!


The media has lost touch with why it exists. The news media is NOT for profit, it is for information and to serve as a major line of defense for the people. We need the media to inform us and to keep the government honest. I watched Helen Thomas on The Daily Show this morning and realized that she's the last of a dying breed. The reporter who isn't afraid of stepping on toes or saying the wrong thing is the only kind of reporter we should have. I believe that a lot of these right-wing broadcast journalists (like Dobbs and O'Reilly) are just placating to the current administration like Tony Snow was. FOX News is nothing but a propaganda station, MSNBC is sensationalistic and CNN is just getting worse with each passing year. NPR is great, but it has such minimal influence over the American public that most of its listeners and viewers are the intellectual types who would already be far more informed than the public. I believe that it is the obligation of the media to keep us informed, and profit and ratings should have nothing to do with the broadcasting.


So how can I, a 24 year old liberal (though staunchly anti-Democratic party), be more of a fan of 86 year-old Helen Thomas ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Thomas ) and 89 year-old Daniel Schorr ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Schorr ) than of the young and hip Dan Abrams or the young and nerdy Tucker Carlson? Simple, they actually use their considerable experience to analyze the issues and put them in an historical perspective. While Abrams, O'Reilly and Carlson have plenty of experience, it's all come after McCarthyism (hell, only O'Reilly was even alive during that time), the Cold War, and the Nixon Administration. I bring those three up because we're back in them. Tell me that this current administration isn't highly reminiscent of Nixon's and you're blind. Tell me that the "war on terror" isn't another Cold War and I will just laugh. Tell me that we're not seeing a reincarnation of McCarthyistic policies and I will show you domestic spying and innocent men being arrested and held without trial for being "suspected Al-Qaeda"...hmm, weren't people locked up or blackballed for being "suspected Communists" only to have many of them emerge as innocent?


So what makes Helen Thomas and Daniel Schorr so much better than the rest might actually be their 80+ years on the planet. They lived through the Great Depression, WWII, Korea, McCarthyism, The Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, Nixon, The falling of the Soviet Union and the Reagan Years, the first Iraq war, the Clinton Impeachment and the Bush debacle. But Lou Dobbs is also an old kook, so shouldn't he be better? To me, it's almost more about the station of CNN itself. They obviously have enough people who have the same xenophobic beliefs as Dobbs. I know for a fact that Dobbs isn't personally affected by illegal immigrants, he didn't lose his job as a day laborer or cleaning lady. Plus, I can't imagine he lives in a place that has a more active border than where I live, and I happen to think that the illegals help those of us who are young urban professionals. When I eat my Mexican meal, I am filled up by $3.33 worth of food. At the white-owned places I am always paying $6.50 or more. Not only that, but those avocados and other fresh produce are far cheaper due to the migrant labor.


So what is the future of television news? The Daily show is quickly becoming the most honest news source (other than NPR and maybe the BBC) in the US, and that's quite sad. I actually get more news from a half hour of Jon Stewart making fun of our press and government than I do from an entire day staring at MSNBC. I don't need to hear about Natalee Holloway every 15 minutes, ditto for Anna Nicole Smith (even if she does look fantastic when going to court, why doesn't she dress and do her makeup like that more often?), I need to hear about the stuff I cannot get by changing the channel to one of the other 5 stations showing the same thing. What about Africa? When our oil prices were going up we saw EVERY news station showing gas prices at local stations and maybe mentioning the war in Iraq, but what about the turmoil in Nigeria? Many people didn''t know that when oil hit its peak, there had been attacks on pipelines in Africa, causing prices to spike. So instead of focusing on the stupid "problems" that bring ratings (gas prices, illegal immigration, terrorism, missing white girls, global warming, bird flu), why not focus on tangible problems and issues facing the world as a whole? Poverty, horrendous ignorance throughout the world (especially in the "red states"), actual epidemics (like Malaria, famine and sleeping sickness to name a few), genocide and what appears to be a rising influence of radical religion. The people are stupid on average (a 100 IQ is quite low in comparison to the average college grad) and they need others to tell them what to "think" about and what to believe. As long as we continue letting people like Dobbs and Abrams give us the news, we're going to continue to see more and more reaching for power by the government...just you watch.