Dobbs, Lou 1945-

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Dobbs, Lou 1945-

PERSONAL: Born September 24, 1945, in Childress, TX; married Debi Segura; children: Chance, Jason, Hilary, Heather. Education: Degree from Harvard University, 1967. Politics: Republican.

ADDRESSES: Office— Cable News Network, One CNN Center, Atlanta, GA 30303.

CAREER: Broadcast journalist and writer. Worked as copy reader at Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, CA, and as reporter with radio and television stations in Arizona and Washington; Cable News Network (CNN), Atlanta, GA, chief economics correspondent and Moneyline anchor, 1980-99, Primenews anchor, 1981, managing editor, business news, 1984-97, executive vice president, 1995-99, anchor and managing editor of Lou Dobbs Tonight (originally titled Lou Dobbs Moneyline), 2001—. CNNfn.com, president 1995-99. Space.com, founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, 1999-2001. Anchor of special programs for CNN. Anchor of nationally syndicated financial news radio report, The Lou Dobbs Financial Report. Columnist for Money magazine and U.S. News and World Report. Member of board of Society of Professional Journalists Foundation, Horatio Alger Association, National Space Foundation, and Space.com.

MEMBER: Planetary Society, Overseas Press Club, American Economic Association, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

AWARDS, HONORS: George Foster Peabody Award (shared with CNN business news team), 1987, for coverage of 1987 stock market crash; Luminary Award, Business Journalism Review, 1990; Father of the Year, National Father’s Day Committee, 1993; Horatio Alger Association Award for Distinguished Americans, 1999; National Space Club Media Award, 2000; Emmy Award, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 2004, for “Exporting America” series of reports on Lou Dobbs Tonight; Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration, Center for Immigration Studies, for “Broken Borders” series of reports on Lou Dobbs Tonight; Man of the Year Award, Organization for the Rights of American Workers, 2004; George J. Kourpias Excellence in Journalism Award, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, 2004; Hugh O’Brien Youth Leadership in Media Award, Albert Schweitzer Leadership Awards, 2004; Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 2005, for business and financial reporting; CableAce Award, Front Page Award, New York Film Festival Award, Janus Award, and Daniel Webster Award.

WRITINGS

NONFICTION

(With H.P. Newquist) Space: The Next Business Frontier, Pocket Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas, Warner Books (New York, NY), 2004.

War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back, Viking Press (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS: Lou Dobbs has long covered business and finance as a broadcast journalist, having joined the Cable News Network (CNN) on its founding in 1980 and hosted such CNN series as Moneyline and Lou Dobbs Tonight. His work has also appeared in print in such books as Space: The Next Business Frontier, which focuses on the commercial opportunities offered by space exploration. His interest in space is such that he left CNN for two years to launch Space.com, a multimedia company providing information about the universe. Another major interest for Dobbs is the impact of globalization, especially the outsourcing of jobs—when U.S. companies reduce employment domestically and expand it in countries where wages are lower—on the U.S. economy.

“The principal issue I have with outsourcing is that American companies. . . are killing jobs in this country and sending them overseas to provide the same goods and services back to the U.S. economy,” Dobbs told Jeff Fleischer in an interview for Mother Jones magazine’s Web site shortly after the publication of Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas.“I have no problem if they want to invest and create a market in India or the Philippines or wherever. That’s great, but don’t kill an American job and put it in the hands of someone making one-tenth as much just to send that same good or service back to the United States.” Unfettered outsourcing, he continued, costs hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs each year, puts downward pressure on wages, and will undermine environmental and labor laws.

Some commentators have noted that Dobbs, a conservative Republican, has taken what many consider the liberal position on the outsourcing issue. He remarked to Fleischer, though, that many conservatives also oppose outsourcing. When Ronald Reagan was president, he called for Japanese automakers to build factories in the United States as part of a trade policy that Dobbs characterized as “rational, balanced, reciprocal.” Mary Frances Wilkens, reviewing Exporting America for Booklist, related that Dobbs thinks the solution to outsourcing will come from neither the Republicans nor the Democrats alone. He does, however, outline “sound ideas for reversing the course” in his “tightly written account,” she added.

Dobbs further explores what he sees as anti-worker policies in War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back. Middle-class Americans are in a precarious economic position, he says, because politicians are beholden to corporate contributors rather than to constituents, religious activists are focused on gay rights and abortion instead of Americans’ standard of living, and companies are hiring illegal immigrants. His proposed remedies include taxpayer funding of political campaigns, stronger ethics rules for public officials, and tighter border control.

Several critics observed that Dobbs’s viewpoints do not follow any political party line and that his writing is stimulating and challenging. A Publishers Weekly reviewer found that Dobbs is “a refreshingly bold thinker who refuses to be intellectually pigeon-holed.” Mary Whaley, writing in Booklist, thought Dobbs “correctly identifies important national issues.” Dermot McEvoy, who interviewed Dobbs for PublishersWeekly, found him and his book to be in harmony with the nation’s concerns. “Love him or hate him,” McEvoy reported, “Lou Dobbs has earned America’s attention.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES

BOOKS

Gale Encyclopedia of E-Commerce, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2002.

PERIODICALS

ABA Banking Journal, May, 2004, Steve Cocheo, “The Dobbs Effect,” p. 32.

Booklist, October 15, 2004, Mary Frances Wilkens, review of Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas, p. 385; October 15, 2006, Mary Whaley, review of War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back, p. 22.

Daily Variety, June 10, 2003, Pamela McClintock, “‘Dobbs’ Revamped, Renamed, Expanded,” p. 4.

Hollywood Reporter, June 10, 2003, Andrew Grossman, “CNN Redubs ‘Dobbs,’ Adds Two Segments,” p. 8; October 18, 2005, Paul J. Gough, “Emmy: Dobbs Career Is Money,” p. 6; October 11, 2006, Paul J. Gough, “CNN Features Dobbs Going into Election,” p. 6.

Publishers Weekly, August 7, 2006, review of War on the Middle Class, p. 46; September 4, 2006, Dermot McEvoy, “The Infuriated American: Lou Dobbs’s Campaign for the Middle Class,” p. 30.

Securities Industry News, May 31, 2004, Carol E. Curtis, “What to Say When Lou Dobbs Calls.”