Lou Dobbs sounded a little, I don't know, meltdown-ish, and not in the supercute "Ice Age" way, on yesterday's Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz on CNN:
KURTZ: You told the "New York Times" this week, quote, "There's nothing fair and balanced about me, because there's nothing fair and balanced about the truth."
DOBBS: Right.
KURTZ: But shouldn't a cable news anchor be fair?
DOBBS: Well, a cable news anchor should be fair always; fair and balanced as a piece of rhetoric about what we're doing here, I don't know. That's up to each individual cable news anchor, as you put it. On "LOU DOBBS TONIGHT", my broadcast, my viewers, my audience expects me to come at them with the unvarnished reality and the truth, irrespective of how the chips fall in the political spectrum. We do that.
Howard, you know that I'm as quick to criticize President Bush and Senator Hillary Clinton, as anyone else. It just doesn't, frankly, matter to me where the partisan views fall on a given subject. My interests are primarily working men and women in this country, the middle class and the national interests. And that's where --
KURTZ: Well when you use a word like truth, what gives you a monopoly on the truth, especially on a sensitive issue...
DOBBS: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! I didn't say I had a monopoly. Come on, you sound like you're doing tabloid journalism, Howard.
KURTZ: There's nothing...
DOBBS: I never said I had a monopoly.
DOBBS: According to you -- "nothing fair and balanced about the truth."
DOBBS: Wait a minute, Howard. I never said I had a -- excuse me -- I'm quoting you; you said, "What gives me a monopoly on the truth? I never said "monopoly on the truth," Howard, you're a better journalist than that. Now you can get to whatever I have said, and I'll be glad to respond.
KURTZ: Well, when you say, "There's nothing fair and balanced about the truth," that raises for me, on an issue like this, where there are so many competing views and there ' so much passion about border security and dealing with illegal immigrants who are already here, that suggests to you that there is one version that one can come up with that would approximate the truth.
DOBBS: As a matter of fact, I think that indeed there is. If you do not accept the idea that one of the roles of any journalist is to get to the truth, then you and I are going to diverge on what the role of any journalist is....My god, Howard! What kind of partisan view do you want? That is truth. Now what that does, in terms of your ideological view, is up to you. But don't suggest to me that truth is always fair and balanced, because it is not. In point of fact, most of the he-says, she-says journalists working in this craft today, both print and electronic, are using it as what I would call a monstrous cop-out and an inability to carry out their responsibility to find the facts.
Who in the -- let me turn the question, a bit, Howard, if I may: Who the hell said there were only two versions of the truth, a Republican view and a Democratic view?
KURTZ: No, there are probably six, seven, eight different version for people with different views and opinions and constituencies and all that.
DOBBS: I'm not interested -- are you interested in six or seven views, or are you interested in the truth? Because that's what I'm interested in; that's what my viewers are interested in.
KURTZ: Let me ask you...
DOBBS: I'm sick and tired -- go ahead; I'm sorry.
KURTZ: Let me ask you about some of the criticism in the press, which I know you're familiar with.
DOBBS: Sure.
KURTZ: A "New York Times" piece this week said, "Critics deride him as anti-immigrant, and racist and biased." "Washington Post" columnist Michael Kinsley on Friday said you "used to be a mild- mannered anchor," and now you've "become a raving populist xenophobe....."
Yeah, I know. How could a guy who says we should ban St. Patrick's Day be even a little bit unstable? There's a shocker.
By the way, it's interesting that CNN won't deign to capitalize "God" in their official transcript. You'd think they'd at least want to follow the example on the dollar bill.
