The “Lou Dobbs Tonight” show on CNN long ago ceased to be a serious news program and has become a nightly screed against free trade, immigration, and a competitive, market economy. The opinions expressed by Lou Dobbs, his “correspondents,” and the large majority of his guests are typically based on questionable and selective facts that miss the real story.
Consider a “Lou Dobbs Tonight” segment the other night on how a “flood” of imports into the United States has caused “the incredible deterioration of the manufacturing industry.” The program’s anchor that night, Kitty Pilgrim, blamed the development on “the commitment of successive administrations to so-called free trade policies.”
The segment featured two biased CNN correspondents plus three guests who are all professional critics of trade: Alan Tonelson of the U.S. Business and Industry Council, an organization of generally declining, protectionists industries; Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-union backed research group; and Bob Baugh of the AFL-CIO, the largest union umbrella organization.
As for the facts, nowhere in the segment was it mentioned that American factories are producing more goods than ever as measured by inflation-adjusted volume. U.S. manufacturing capacity and production have actually increased by 50 percent, in real terms, since the early 1990s, when such important trade agreements as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay Round Agreements Act went into effect. Domestic output of automobiles and parts, a special focus of the CNN segment, is also much higher than in the earlier, pre-NAFTA, pre-WTO days.
As Cato research has shown, imports of manufactured goods and domestic output of manufactured goods tend to rise and fall together along with the overall health of the U.S. economy. When we prosper, we trade; when we trade, we prosper.
Apparently the “Lou Dobbs Tonight” program won’t let a few basic facts get in the way of a sensationalized story. Perhaps CNN should change its name to the Cable Opinion Network, or CON for short.