Adios, Lou Dobbs
Q&A with
Roberto Lovato and Marcelo Ballvé
New America Media
NAM Editor’s note: After
Wednesday's abrupt on-air resignation of veteran CNN anchor Lou Dobbs,
many Latino advocacy and immigrant rights groups felt vindicated. They
had long criticized the anchor’s coverage of illegal immigration as
obsessive, prejudiced, and sometimes wildly inaccurate. When CNN aired
its “Latino in America” series last month, Dobbs’ critics said the
network couldn’t have it both ways, offering nuanced portrayals of
immigration while also offering Dobbs a platform to air his hardline
views. Roberto Lovato, co-founder of Presente.org and former NAM
contributor, recently emerged as the most visible figure in the
anti-Dobbs groundswell. Lovato spoke with NAM contributing editor
Marcelo Ballvé about Dobbs’ sudden resignation and what it means in the
context of Latino and immigration politics.
Presente.org is a
relatively new organization, yet it played a prominent role in the
campaign against Lou Dobbs. What can you tells us about Presente's
origins and purpose?
Presente.org is born of
the need to help the Latino community use media and technology to
advance its agenda, and to build its power. One of the key ways to do
that is to amass a list of people, much like Moveon.org did previously.
You build that list by organizing campaigns. Presente.org was born
earlier this year, actually. Its first campaigns were around the hate
killing of Luis Ramirez in Pennsylvania and the nomination of Sonia
Sotomayor. Those were the dress rehearsals for our most ambitious
campaign, which was the “Basta Dobbs” campaign [Basta means “enough” in
Spanish].
As your campaign
accumulated momentum, Lou Dobbs invoked the First Amendment and accused
his enemies of trying to silence him merely because he opposed illegal
immigration. Has a legitimate voice been muzzled?
No less a figure than Ted
Turner, the founder of CNN, said he would fire Lou Dobbs at the drop of
a hat for what he has done to hurt Latinos and immigrants. There are
precedents for this -- people who have been taken off the local and
national airwaves for what they said in just a brief moment of airtime.
It happened to Don Imus, for example. But Lou Dobbs has had a free ride
on the rollercoaster of hate at CNN for many years. This has nothing to
do with the First Amendment. This is about hatred, and the business of
profiting from hatred against Latinos and other immigrant groups versus
profiting from legitimate journalism like “Latino in America.”
Lou Dobbs framed the
resignation as his own decision, motivated by his desire to have a freer
hand in engaging in political activity and advocacy around issues that
matter to him, including illegal immigration. What do you think of that
explanation?
It’s hard to know what
lurks in the dark heart of Lou Dobbs. We need to look at his record of
prevarication, myth-making, and outright lies. That may be his modus
operandi until his last days. What’s certain is that his exit was
abrupt. The great anchors of our time, like Walter Cronkite, don’t
depart from one day to the next, unexpectedly. In any case, in the same
way that it would not be entirely true for the “Basta Dobbs” campaign to
claim total credit, nor would it make any sense to think that this is
something that Dobbs only did of his own volition, or to think that CNN
didn’t feel external pressure. They did.
The figure of Lou Dobbs
and his exit from CNN raises the question of what the parameters should
be for a legitimate stance against illegal immigration. What do you
think they are?
To begin with, Lou Dobbs’
problem wasn’t just with undocumented immigrants. His vision took in
legal immigrants as a whole and Latinos as a whole. Dobbs knows we don’t
live in the Jim Crow era of naked racism. You don’t use tools like the
“N” word anymore. Instead you use the “I” word. You call people
“illegals” or “invaders” and variations of the “illegal” term. Lou
Dobbs, in using these words, tarnished an entire community, and he did
so for years. So in the end, he got what anyone’s going to get when they
attack an entire community: people standing up and saying “basta ya” …
enough. We need a more sane and rational debate around immigration. We
don’t need name-calling, and nonsense, and lies that are a total bore,
and a great concern to many of us.
How important a role did
technology and online media play in gathering over 100,000 signatures
for the “Basta Dobbs” campaign? Can the immigrant rights movement make
better use of this organizing tool?
The deployment of
technology and media is already a part of the immigrant rights movement.
We focused the strategy a little bit more with Basta Dobbs. This is a
case study for the possibilities of online and offline organizing for
immigrant rights. Because we didn’t just stay online, we went offline as
well. We went to the 25 top Latino markets in the United States to
organize people and hold rallies, knowing CNN wanted to get into those
cities, which represent 75 percent of the U.S. Latino market. And we
weren’t building a list of 100,000 or 200,000 people for nothing. It’s a
measure of the economic power of an organized Latino viewing audience,
which has now taken on historic proportions in the United States. We are
hopeful that the victory over Lou Dobbs and CNN represents a new day in
U.S. media. It’s not going to be so easy to profit from hatred against
Latinos and immigrants. Because we have an organized populace that is
willing to defend itself when it has to, when it is under attack, we’re
going to see lots of media companies thinking twice about what they say
and how they report about Latinos in the U.S. Latinos are joining
African Americans and Jews and other groups in the fight to change how
they are portrayed in the media, and that’s a thrilling development.
How did you feel as you
watched Lou Dobbs make his final broadcast last night?
I cried when I saw Lou
Dobbs giving his actually fairly moving farewell speech. I cried in part
because I saw an aging person and an aging media persona saying goodbye
in an abrupt way. But the main reason I cried is that it was clear that
his departure had a profound significance for so many of us who have
fought against him since he first began broadcasting his message of hate
against immigrants. It’s poetic justice that his beginnings and his rise
had a lot to do with his attacks on immigrants and now his demise has a
lot to do with immigrants. I’ve been on Spanish-language radio all this
morning, immersed in the buzz, the excitement, the sense of
accomplishment, and hearing people say “sí se pudo” (yes, we did it).
Not yes we can, sí se puede, but yes we did it. That kind of phrase
strikes a deep chord for all of us.
We were witnessing the end
of an era for Lou Dobbs and the beginning of a new era for Latinos and
immigrants in the United States. We were seeing the extension of the
civil rights struggles to the media age. In a country where almost
everyone has a cell phone and access to the Internet and where
everyone’s wired, issues of social justice have everything to do with
media. And Lou Dobbs has woken up Latinos to that fact. We marched with
our feet as we did in 2006 for immigration reform, but we also marched
with our fingers across keyboards and phone pads. I got to see the birth
of the contemporary immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles when
Latinos led the fight in the streets against Proposition 187 in
California [in 1994]. I’ve been all over the streets of the electronic
airwaves today, and I have the same feeling from all the people saying
sí se pudo.
In what direction does
presente.org plan to channel its energy next?
Like Lou Dobbs,
Presente.org lives or dies depending on the energy of Latinos and
immigrants. So the future is to be defined in consultation with members
in 25 cities and groups like the National Association of Latino and
Caribbean Communities. We have to consult with the over 100,000 people
who gave us their signatures. We have started talking about issues like
immigration reform. Some people have said: why don’t you take this
energy and go after [notorious immigration hardliner in [Arizona]
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Lou Dobbs’ good friend? Right now we’re just
recovering from this stunning victory. Soon enough we will define a new
course.
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