“Managing” without Lou Dobbs

It will be tough, but I’ll try…

This year we’ve lost Walter Cronkite and Don Hewitt…two giants of broadcast journalism. Now we’re losing CNN’s Lou Dobbs. Well…not quite. He certainly is still among the living; and while he is leaving the cable network, he has vowed to “go beyond the role at CNN and engage in constructive problem solving.”

I’d find this amusing given his last several years on the air except it seems there are a lot of devoted followers of Mr. Dobbs out there who professed this devotion on his radio call-in show the following day. (Yes, he has one too.) Not surprisingly most of the devotees hoped he would be joining their favorite “news source,” Fox, or even running for political office. "We need you in the Senate, Lou,” one caller exhorted. Now there’s a thought…next speech before a joint session of Congress, he could join Representative Wilson in shouting down the President over immigration issues.

In his on-air departure announcement Dobbs said, "Each of those (major) issues is, in my opinion, informed by our capacity to demonstrate strong resilience of our now weakened capitalist economy and demonstrate the political will to overcome the lack of true representation in Washington, D.C. I believe these to be profoundly, critically important issues and I will continue to strive to deal honestly and straightforwardly with those issues in the future." Those issues, he added, are defined in the public arena "by partisanship and ideology rather than by rigorous, empirical forethought, analysis and discussion," and he vowed to work to change that.

In my humble opinion, Dobbs’ first step in changing the fact that partisanship and ideology are defining the issues in the public arena is his leaving the bloody CNN pulpit he’s been using for the last several years. Amen.

Ironically and once again for the sake of full disclosure, fifteen years ago Dobbs was hosting a weekend half-hour CNN business show from New York titled, “Managing With Lou Dobbs” on which I was a featured guest one week. While I admittedly enjoyed the attention the show focused on my PR business, I was underwhelmed by Dobb’s lack of preparation for the interview. Ok, I admit managing a national PR firm is not the same as being the head of the Federal Reserve, but a little professionalism would have been nice. (For those of you devotees, this show was prior to Dobbs’ previous departure from CNN in the heady days before the tech bubble burst. He left then to start his own dot-com devoted to space exploration. Alas, the bubble burst and Lou, perhaps a little less flush but no less humble as the journalist/advocate, returned to CNN.)

It may not be CNN next time, but Lou Dobbs needs the adulation of the multitudes and not the clubby Senate camaraderie of Al Franken. He’ll be back on the air soon enough.