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Lou Dobbs Fires Back at N.Y. Times
CNN’s Lou Dobbs has blasted New York Times columnist David Leonhardt for a column that Dobbs calls a "scurrilous personal attack” on the anti-illegal immigration crusader.
The column, headlined "Truth, Fiction and Lou Dobbs,” appeared in the Times on Wednesday. Dobbs responded on his show "Lou Dobbs Tonight” on Wednesday night, telling viewers: "I've been over the years, because of our reporting on controversial issues and my strongly held beliefs on those issues, attacked - and usually pretty vigorously - by both the left wing and the right wing of this nation's media, both mainstream and otherwise, and of course the politicians that form the extremes of our political spectrum.
"Today, The New York Times published a column that picks up where an advertisement, a paid advertisement in The Times, paid for by the Southern Poverty Law Center, left off two weeks ago.”
Story Continues Below The Law Center, a civil rights group that has been critical of Dobbs, took out ads in the Times and USA Today taking issue with a Dobbs report. In his Wednesday telecast, Dobbs said the Times column accused him of "overstating the number of non-citizens in our federal prisons. That number [was] reported on this broadcast three and a half years ago. "Now, no one hates making a mistake, I assure you, more than I do. And on this broadcast, we do make mistakes - not often, mind you, but certainly enough to frustrate me mightily, and with barely tolerable frequency.
"But today's scurrilous personal attack from The New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, carrying the water of the Southern Poverty Law Center, also has the facts wrong. "He wrote that I said, quote, that ‘One third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants.’ That isn't what I said. I didn't say anything close to it. "We reported that one-third of the federal prison population three and a half years ago were non-citizens. The columnist said the number was 6 percent. The exact number of the year in question was 29.3 percent . . .
"Let's look at a few other issues, however, raised by The New York Times, including that columnist's statement that none of the enemies of the middle class, he said I said, ‘play a bigger role than illegal immigrants.’ "Well, again, that's just not true. I've made perfectly clear over the years that corporate power, expressed by lobbyists spending billions of dollars each year in Washington to influence both political parties and public policy, represents the greatest single threat to this nation's middle class.” Dobbs concluded: "As I said tonight at the outset, I don't like personal attacks from both the left and the right wings, but I'm getting kind of used to it. I will assure you that we'll continue to report on the nonpartisan independent reality that is too often overwhelmed by the ideologues in our national media, the left wing and the right wing.”
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Immigration/Borders Inside Cover Stories
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