64 Facts About Lou Dobbs

Lou Dobbs resigned from CNN in 1999 but rejoined the network in 2001.

Lou Dobbs is the former talk radio host of Lou Dobbs Radio.

Lou Dobbs was an early promoter of Birtherism, a conspiracy theory that falsely stated that former US President Barack Obama is not a natural born US citizen.

Lou Dobbs is known for anti-immigration views, as well as for opposition to NAFTA and other trade deals.

Lou Dobbs was one of three Fox Corporation program hosts named in a $2.7 billion defamation suit by Smartmatic relating to attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election.

When Lou Dobbs was age twelve, his father's propane business failed and the family moved to Rupert, Idaho.

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.

Lou Dobbs married his high school sweetheart in 1969, and in 1970 their first son was born.

Lou Dobbs moved to Yuma, Arizona, and got a job as a police and fire reporter for KBLU.

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.

Lou Dobbs served as a corporate executive for CNN, as its executive vice president and as a member of CNN's executive committee.

Lou Dobbs founded CNN fn, serving as its president and anchoring the program Business Unusual, which examined business creativity and leadership.

Lou Dobbs repeatedly clashed with Rick Kaplan, who became president of CNN in 1997.

Lou Dobbs ordered the producer to cut away from the speech and return to broadcast Moneyline.

Lou Dobbs was countermanded by Kaplan, who ordered CNN to return to the speech.

Lou Dobbs was replaced as host of Moneyline by Willow Bay and Stuart Varney.

Lou Dobbs announced that he was leaving CNN to start up the site Space.

Lou Dobbs was one of the primary shareholders in that company and later that year became Space.

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.

Lou Dobbs regained the helm of the newly renamed Lou Dobbs Moneyline.

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.

In July 2009, controversy around Lou Dobbs began when he was the only mainstream news anchor to give airtime to the birther theory.

Lou Dobbs was reportedly paid $8 million in severance pay when he left CNN.

Former Senator Dean Barkley said he thought Lou Dobbs should run for president.

In June 2008, Lou Dobbs reached an agreement with Business Talk Radio Network to carry a rebroadcast of the show from 7 to 10 pm Eastern, displacing Bruce Williams.

Lou Dobbs's show was carried live on CRN Digital Talk Radio Networks.

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.

Lou Dobbs mentioned on his radio show that he was seeking a position in the US Department of Treasury during the economic crisis.

Since 2009, Lou Dobbs has 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.

On October 5,2010, Lou Dobbs made a guest appearance on an episode of The Good Wife, entitled "Double Jeopardy", in which he plays himself as a client in search of a new law firm to represent his legal interests.

Lou Dobbs is known for his anti-immigration views, warnings about Islamist terrorism, and his opposition to outsourcing.

In December 2018, Lou Dobbs suggested that the United States should start a war with China because of hacking by Chinese state actors.

Lou Dobbs compared hacking by the People's Liberation Army of China to the attack by the Japanese military on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Lou Dobbs promoted the theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Lou Dobbs has misleadingly asserted that "scientists" warned of global cooling in the 1970s, though that was a distinctly minority view.

Lou Dobbs has been strongly opposed to both illegal immigration and foreign worker programs as the H-1B visa program and guest-worker programs.

Lou Dobbs's show has 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.

Lou Dobbs has criticized local officials for their approach to border security.

In March 2009, Lou Dobbs said he thought that there should not be a St Patrick's Day.

Trump repeatedly calls Lou Dobbs to get his views on various policy issues.

In January 2018, Lou Dobbs called for a "war" on the "Deep State", which he described as the FBI, other areas of the intelligence community and the Department of Justice.

Lou Dobbs said that the FBI and DOJ had destroyed evidence and that they were clandestinely working to bring down the Trump presidency.

In June 2018, Lou Dobbs promoted a conspiracy reported on Reddit and the right-wing website Gateway Pundit that "the FBI may have initiated a number of spies into the Trump campaign as early as December of 2015".

In July 2018, Lou Dobbs defended the Trump administration's decision to ban a CNN reporter from a press event.

In September 2018, after Trump claimed that the official death count from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was fabricated by Democrats, Lou Dobbs defended Trump's assertion.

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".

In October 2018, when CNN and prominent Democrats were targeted with bomb attempts, Lou Dobbs described the bomb attempts as "fake news" and promoted conspiracy theories that the bomb attempts were by Democrats who sought to increase their support in the upcoming mid-term elections.

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, as well as Romney's losing a winnable 2012 presidential with Paul Ryan as his running mate.

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".

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.

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 machine company Smartmatic which had been the subject of some of the conspiracy theorizing.

Lou Dobbs has claimed numerous conspiracy theories about the Jewish-American philanthropist and businessman George Soros.

Lou Dobbs has referred to him as an "evil SOB" and insidious.

On September 11,2019, Lou Dobbs warned his viewers on Fox Business that Soros's "tentacles were spreading globally".

Lou Dobbs opposes gun control and, though he is a fiscal conservative, supports some government regulations, as revealed in a 60 Minutes interview.

Lou Dobbs has been critical of trade policies that he says encourage "sending jobs overseas".

Lou Dobbs is the author of War on the Middle Class, in which he claims that both Democrats and Republicans are harming the middle class.

Lou Dobbs has won numerous major awards for his television journalism, including a Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award and a Cable Ace Award.

Lou Dobbs received the George Foster Peabody Award for his coverage of the 1987 stock market crash.

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.

In 2004, Lou Dobbs was awarded the Eugene Katz Award For Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration by the Center for Immigration Studies and in 2005 he received the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's Statesmanship Award.

Lou Dobbs was named "Father of the Year" by the National Father's Day Committee in 1993.

In 2008 Lou Dobbs received the American Legion Public Relations Award from the National Commander of The American Legion.

Lou Dobbs divorced his first wife in 1981 and later married Debi Lee Segura, a former CNN sports anchor.