Friendly Fire? CNN’s Lou Dobbs Gets Called Out By CNN’s Reliable Sources

On this week’s Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz struck back at CNN cohort Lou Dobbs. Dobbs had claimed earlier in the week that he and his wife had been shot at in their New Jersey home, in part due to the “national liberal media” and its coverage in the immigration debate.

Kurtz and guest Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg were skeptical.

According to Carlson, Dobbs “takes extreme views” on immigration and other hot-button political issues “in part for ratings.” Carlson went so far as to equate Dobbs with Glenn Beck, and said that both men represented the media type who “come[s] to believe when you’re saying because it is so satisfying to you in terms of ratings and income” rather than out of any deeper personal conviction.

She also took issue with the truth of his shooting claims. Think Progress (not mentioned in the Reliable Sources segment) reports that the New Jersey State Police have not ruled out the possibility that the shooting was a “hunting-related incident,” which a spokesman said was not uncommon in the “very rural” area where Dobbs lives.

Howard Kurtz didn’t dive too deep in the mounting debate between Carlson and The American Spectator’s John Fund, but he did implicitly question Dobbs’s shooting claim. Crucially, Kurtz framed the question of a shooting by a “nut” as an “if” rather than a certainty. Carlson said that there was “absolutely no evidence that somebody was shooting at him or his wife,” and while Kurtz didn’t wholeheartedly agree, he did mention that New Jersey police have tried to downplay the incident in the press. Given that both Kurtz and Dobbs operate under the CNN flag (and Kurtz has been singled out by Media Matters in the past for not criticizing Dobbs enough), his display of skepticism was significant.

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