Biz coverage by Dobbs at CNN raises questions

Freelance journalist Isabel Macdonald writes on The Huffington Post on Thursday about some questionable tactics used by Lou Dobbs — hired by Fox Business Network on Wednesday — when he covered business for CNN.

McDonald writes, “On his CNN show, Dobbs was an outspoken critic of corporate outsourcing, and even created a website, ‘Exporting America,’ devoted to exposing individual corporations that he accused of shutting down U.S. factories and moving production overseas to cut labor costs. Yet as a 2004 Columbia Journalism Review article, The Two Faces of Lou Dobbs, documented, many of the same corporations criticized on Dobbs’s ‘Exporting America’ site were praised by Dobbs in his now-cancelled exclusive investment newsletter, Lou Dobbs Money Letter. In his Money Letter, Dobbs offered paid subscribers tips on investments, typically going ‘out of his way to praise [the companies he recommended] as good corporate citizens,’ according CJR‘s Zachary Roth.

“As Roth noted in his June 2004 article, some of the companies featured in the Lou Dobbs Money Letter, under the heading ‘doing good business with good people,’ would be familiar to the audience of Dobbs’s ‘Exporting America.’ In fact, CJR found that of the 14 companies Dobbs highlighted for investors in his newsletter in 2003-4, eight appeared during the same timeframe on his CNN website as companies that outsourced jobs.”

Read more here.