1. Louis Carl Dobbs was an American conservative political commentator, author, and television host who presented Moneyline from 1980 to 2009 and 2011 to 2021.
72 Facts About Lou Dobbs
1. 2.
Lou Dobbs resigned from CNN in 1999 but rejoined the network in 2001.
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Lou Dobbs was the former talk radio host of Lou Dobbs Radio.
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Lou Dobbs was an early promoter of birtherism, the unfounded accusation that former US President Barack Obama is not a natural-born US citizen.
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Lou Dobbs was known for anti-illegal immigration views, as well as for opposition to NAFTA and other trade deals.
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Lou Dobbs was one of three Fox Corporation program hosts named in a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit by Smartmatic relating to conspiracy theories used in attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election.
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Louis Carl Dobbs was born September 24,1945, in Childress, Texas.
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Lou Dobbs was the son of Frank Dobbs, a co-owner of a propane business, and Lydia Mae, a bookkeeper.
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When Lou Dobbs was twelve, his father's propane business failed and the family moved to Rupert, Idaho.
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Lou Dobbs briefly attended the University of Idaho College of Law in Moscow, and then worked as a cash-management specialist for Union Bank of California in Los Angeles.
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Lou Dobbs married his high school sweetheart in 1967, and in 1970 their first son was born.
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Lou Dobbs moved to Yuma, Arizona, and got a job as a police and fire reporter for KBLU.
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Lou Dobbs joined CNN when it launched in 1980, serving as its chief economics correspondent and as host of the business news program Moneyline on CNN.
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Lou Dobbs served as a corporate executive for CNN, as its executive vice president and as a member of CNN's executive committee.
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Lou Dobbs was president of CNNfn and anchored the program Business Unusual.
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Lou Dobbs's ratings were typically triple that of his former protege, Maria Bartiromo.
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Howard Kurtz, in his book on business journalism of the era, wrote that Lou Dobbs "could be arrogant and abrasive" and was controversial within CNN.
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In 1992, Lou Dobbs admitted to receiving more than $15,000 to act as a spokesman from Shearson Lehman Brothers, PaineWebber, and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, making promotional videos; he was reprimanded by the network for the conflict of interest and expressed regret in a memo to staff.
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Lou Dobbs nearly left the network in 1997 over a clash on CNNfn's direction; he ultimately convinced Turner to expand CNNfn from 14 hours per day to 18 hours per day, with a commitment to further increase it to 24 hours per day.
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Lou Dobbs repeatedly clashed with Rick Kaplan, who became president of CNN in 1997.
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Lou Dobbs ordered the producer to cut away from the speech and return to broadcast Moneyline.
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Lou Dobbs was countermanded by Kaplan, who ordered CNN to return to the speech.
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Lou Dobbs was replaced as host of Moneyline by Willow Bay and Stuart Varney.
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Lou Dobbs announced that he was leaving CNN to start up the site Space.
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Lou Dobbs was one of the primary shareholders in that company and later that year became Space.
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Kaplan left CNN in August 2000, and Dobbs returned the following year, at the behest of his friend and CNN founder Ted Turner, becoming host and managing editor of the new and initially more general news program Lou Dobbs Reporting, which later became CNN News Sunday Morning.
27.
Lou Dobbs regained the helm of the newly renamed Lou Dobbs Moneyline.
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Lou Dobbs became a self-described populist after his return to CNN, and criticized the "greed" of big corporations and their opposition to raising the minimum wage.
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In July 2009, controversy around Lou Dobbs began when he was the only mainstream news anchor to give airtime to the birther theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
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Lou Dobbs was reportedly paid $8 million in severance pay when he left CNN.
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Lou Dobbs was among the hosts who tried out for the position vacated by the cancellation of Imus in the Morning on WFAN, a position that was eventually filled by Boomer and Carton in the Morning.
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Since 2009, Lou Dobbs had made regular appearances to discuss issues on other news network programs including CNBC's The Kudlow Report and Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor.
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On October 5,2010, Lou Dobbs made a guest appearance on an episode of The Good Wife, entitled "Double Jeopardy", in which he plays a client in search of a new law firm to represent his legal interests.
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Lou Dobbs was known for his anti-immigration views, warnings about Islamist terrorism, and his opposition to outsourcing.
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In December 2018, Lou Dobbs suggested that the United States should start a war with China because of hacking by Chinese state actors.
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Lou Dobbs compared hacking by the People's Liberation Army of China to the attack by the Japanese military on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
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In 2009, Lou Dobbs promoted the false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
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Lou Dobbs's repeated promotion of discredited "birther" conspiracies even though CNN itself considered it a "discredited rumor", revived a topic that had largely disappeared from the media spotlight after the 2008 presidential campaign.
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The Associated Press said that Lou Dobbs had "become a publicity nightmare for CNN, embarrassed his boss and hosted a show that seemed to contradict the network's 'no bias' brand".
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Lou Dobbs claimed that the scientific consensus on climate change was a hoax.
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Lou Dobbs had asserted that scientists warned of global cooling in the 1970s, though that was a distinctly minority view.
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Lou Dobbs likened Obama administration's EPA to the Soviet bureacracy.
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Lou Dobbs was strongly opposed to both illegal immigration and foreign worker programs as the H-1B visa program and guest-worker programs.
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Lou Dobbs's show made factually incorrect claims, such as the one that illegal immigrants were responsible for bringing 7,000 new cases of leprosy to the United States in a three-year period, where the actual timeframe was over the last thirty years.
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Lou Dobbs criticized local officials for their approach to border security.
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Lou Dobbs's fawning coverage of the Trump presidency was described as sycophantic.
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Trump repeatedly called Lou Dobbs to get his views on various policy issues.
48.
In June 2018, Lou Dobbs promoted a conspiracy which originated on Reddit and the far-right conspiracy website Gateway Pundit that "the FBI may have initiated a number of spies" into Trump's 2016 campaign.
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In July 2018, Lou Dobbs defended the Trump administration's decision to ban a CNN reporter from a press event.
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Lou Dobbs's defense led to charges of hypocrisy: in 2012, when a Daily Caller reporter was criticized by the White House for shouting out a question during an address by Obama, Dobbs defended the reporter, saying "What is rude is a president not speaking to the American people and taking the questions of the White House press".
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In September 2018, after Trump inaccurately claimed that the official death count from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was fabricated by Democrats, Lou Dobbs defended Trump's assertion.
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Lou Dobbs claimed that "the numbers were inflated" and that the organizations behind the numbers "threw out science, statistics, and evidence to discredit the Trump administration".
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In October 2018, when CNN and prominent Democrats were targeted with mail bomb, Lou Dobbs described the bomb attempts as "fake news" and baselessly claimed that the mail bombs were sent by Democrats who sought to increase their support in the upcoming mid-term elections.
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When US District Court Judge Timothy J Kelly, a Trump appointee, temporarily restored Acosta's press pass, Dobbs described the ruling as "absurd".
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In January 2019, Lou Dobbs described Mitt Romney as a "traitor" and "treasonous" after he wrote an op-ed published in The Washington Post criticizing Trump's character.
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In July 2019, Lou Dobbs referred to US military generals who raised concerns about Trump's decision to put on a July 4 military show in Washington DC as "snowflake generals".
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On his show the following day, Lou Dobbs asserted that Bolton had been "reduced to a tool for the radical Dems and the deep state with his allegation".
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The day senior Justice Department officials intervened in the case of longtime Trump associate Roger Stone with a recommendation of a lighter sentence than had been recommended by DOJ prosecutors the prior day, Lou Dobbs stated on his program that attorney general Bill Barr was "doing the Lord's work" by intervening.
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Lou Dobbs said that Republicans who voted to certify Joe Biden's Electoral College win were "criminal".
60.
In December 2020, Lou Dobbs aired a segment on his show debunking the very same conspiracy theories that had been amplified on his show; this was in response to a legal threat by the voting technology company Smartmatic which had been the subject of some of the conspiracy theorizing.
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Lou Dobbs was a proponent of numerous conspiracy theories about the Jewish-American philanthropist and businessman George Soros.
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Lou Dobbs referred to him as an "evil SOB" and insidious.
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Lou Dobbs opposed gun control and, though he was a fiscal conservative, supported some government regulations, as revealed in a 60 Minutes interview.
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Lou Dobbs was critical of trade policies that he said encourage "sending jobs overseas".
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Lou Dobbs was the author of War on the Middle Class, in which he claimed both Democrats and Republicans are harming the middle class.
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In March 2009, Lou Dobbs said he thought there should not be a St Patrick's Day.
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Lou Dobbs won numerous major awards for his television journalism, including a Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award and a Cable Ace Award.
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Lou Dobbs received the George Foster Peabody Award for his coverage of the 1987 stock market crash.
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Lou Dobbs has received the Luminary Award of the Business Journalism Review in 1990, the Horatio Alger Association Award for Distinguished Americans in 1999 and the National Space Club Media Award in 2000.
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In 2004, Lou Dobbs was awarded the Eugene Katz Award For Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration by the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant think tank founded by white supremacist John Tanton, and in 2005 he received the now-defunct Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's Statesmanship Award.
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In 2008 Lou Dobbs received the American Legion Public Relations Award from the National Commander of The American Legion.
72.
Lou Dobbs divorced his first wife in 1981 and later married Debi Lee Segura, a former CNN sports anchor.