"The Punisher," aka The Los Angeles Times' Tim Rutten, administers a knockout beat-down to CNN, Lou Dobbs and CNN prez Jon Klein like nobody's business:
It's been a while since a major American news organization treated an important national issue as irresponsibly as CNN now does immigration.
Ever since Fox News took over the top spot in the cable news ratings, CNN has thrashed from one failed strategy to another. At the moment, the network's reporters and anchors bleed all over every story they touch...
..."Fair and balanced" already is taken, so one supposes that Dobbs' slogan will have to be "bully and bluster."
His program doesn't actually add up to much more than that, but its recklessness and violent rhetoric on immigration unsurprisingly attracts a following — and in cable it doesn't take much of a following to boost your numbers. This week, Jonathan Klein — who runs CNN, for now — assured the New York Times that Dobbs' anti-immigrant advocacy "is not a harbinger of things to come at CNN. He is sui generis, one of a kind."
That's a sort of relief.
But it didn't stop Klein from plastering Dobbs, a onetime financial journalist best known for fawning interviews with corporate chief executives, and his views across every inch of the network all week long. (Why does the image of drowning men and ropes come to mind?)
