Lou Dobbs Wins Immigration Coverage Award

Lou Dobbs of CNN has been named the recipient of the 2004 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration.

This award, presented since 1997 by the Center for Immigration Studies, is intended to promote informed and fair reporting on this most contentious and complicated issue.

Dobbs' program, "Lou Dobbs Tonight," has reported extensively and in-depth on immigration issues under the rubric of the "Broken Borders" segment of his program.

Dobbs and his team of correspondents focus on immigration matters several times a week, speaking with a wide variety of guests, from congressmen to school superintendents, from Border Patrol agents to policy analysts.

He has started what amounts to the only immigration "beat" on television, something even few newspapers have, examining the workings of our immigration system and its effects on security, the economy, public services, etc.

Dobbs has won nearly every major award for television journalism, including the George Foster Peabody Award for his coverage of the 1987 stock market crash and the Luminary Award, from the Business Journalism Review, for his "visionary work, which changed the landscape of business journalism in the 1980s."

In addition to serving as anchor and managing editor of "Lou Dobbs Tonight," Dobbs also anchors a nationally syndicated financial news radio report, "The Lou Dobbs Financial Report," and is a columnist for Money magazine and U.S. News and World Report.

The inspiration for the award was Eugene Katz, a native New Yorker who started his career, after Dartmouth and Oxford, as a reporter for the Daily Oklahoman. In 1928 he joined the family business, working as an advertising salesman for the Katz Agency, and in 1952 became the president of Katz Communications, a half-billion-dollar firm which not only dealt in radio and television advertising but also owned and managed a number of radio stations. Mr. Katz was also a member of the Center for Immigration Studies board until shortly after his 90th birthday in 1997. He passed away in March 2000 at the age of 93.

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