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face is certainly familiar and yet, out of context,
meeting the man for the first time in his cluttered
office above Manhattan's Eighth Avenue, an office
dominated by a huge relief map of the world, he
seems to be someone else altogether. Lou Dobbs, the
anchor
and managing editor of CNN's long-running nightly
financial newscast, "Lou Dobbs Moneyline," seldom
gets a chance to smile while he's on the air reporting
the day's business and market news. His job, of
course, requires a certain amount of gravitas.
But here,
with his shirt collar unbuttoned and his necktie
dangling untied, he is as warmly affable as he
is informal. He
has good reason to be relaxed at work. He has, after
all, been doing this job for 20 years, almost all
of his professional life, and has seen "Moneyline" grow
into what CNN boasts is "the most prestigious
business news program in history." It also has
to be credited as one of the most successful programs
of its sort globally, aired in some 210 countries
around the world. In his spare time, Dobbs also anchors
a financial news report on radio, syndicated to 731
stations in the US, and writes a monthly column for
Money magazine.
But on this overcast spring afternoon, with
stormy weather in the forecast, the smile on
Dobbs' face gave way to a more serious expression
as the conversation turned toward the current
crisis in financial reporting by business.
"I have never in my life seen the fundamental
integrity of financial reporting so severely
questioned. Never has skepticism been more
apparent." he said. What had gone wrong?
Dobbs attributed it to a failure of the regulators
to provide oversight. "They have simply
not been doing their jobs." For them to
have allowed conflicts of interest such as
those that have cropped up between the audit
and consulting functions of accounting firms,
or between the investment banking and research
arms of Wall Street brokerages, was, he said, "simply
absurd."
He added that
some of the excesses can also be blamed on
the permissiveness of Congress,
which has opposed tighter regulation of the
accounting industry. "There is plenty
of blame to go around ... we have had a tremendous
awakening."
He characterized
official reforms efforts so far as "tepid and half-measures," but
voiced the hope that the exchanges, brokerage
and accounting firms "will reform themselves." That
is needed, he said, if they are to serve investors
better. "The right thing for them to do," he
said, "is to get honest and get on with
the job of making money for their investors."
On the other
hand, he said, the investors themselves have
the ultimate responsibility. "Each
of us is responsible for our investment decisions," he
said. "If we don't take that responsibility
seriously, we will become victims."
But did public
skepticism about the quality of corporate
reporting make it more difficult
for him to do his job of reporting business
news? Dobbs smiled again. "No," he
said. "We journalists have always had
to rely on the quality of our sources."
Journalism
has been Dobbs' calling for all of his working
life. After receiving a degree
in economics from Harvard University, he went
to work as a television reporter and anchor
at a couple of stations in Arizona and one
in Seattle. Then in 1980 he became one of the
founding members of CNN, the Cable News Network.
He became the anchor of "Moneyline" that
same year and has held post ever since, except
for a two-year break (1999-2001) during which
he launched Space.com, a multimedia company
dedicated to space-related content. He was
also responsible for overseeing the launch
of CNNfn and CNNfn.com in 1995. He served for
several years as president of CNNfn and executive
vice president of CNN. Along the way he has
won several awards, including the George Foster
Peabody Award for his coverage of the stock
market crash in 1987. In 1990 the Business
Journalism Review gave him its Luminary Award
for his "visionary work, which changed
the landscape of business journalism in the
1980s."
Asked what
he regards at the key to his success as a
broadcast journalist, he hesitated a moment
and then suggested it might be "the perspective
I bring, the context, to the day's news. Viewers
understand that they're going to get a straightforward
account. They know they can rely on my judgment
and the analysis I bring." An important
reason why viewers can have that confidence,
he added, is that he's been "in the same
anchor chair for two decades."
What advice
does he have for young people interested
in following his career footsteps?
Again he smiled and joked, "Don't count
on it!" He has been extremely fortunate,
he said. As for young people interested in
entering the field of broadcast journalism,
he offered this bit of advice: "If you're
doing it for the money, don't bother. But if
you love the chase of a story and its telling,
if you are fascinated by people, you're going
to do well."
One subject
that clearly fascinates Dobbs is the interrelationship
of "business
news" with everything else that's going
on in the world. Some of the commentaries he
has done recently on "Moneyline," for
example, have dealt with the turmoil in the
Middle East, the economics and politics of
oil, and reform of corporate governance. "There
can be no prosperity," he told Earth Times, "when
there is a lack of security."
As a corollary,
he continued, the public investment necessary
to make the world free from terrorism "cannot
have too high a price. Democracy, which is
inherently linked to free markets, must prevail."
Asked how he
felt about sustainable development, 10 years
after that concept was approved at
the Earth Summit, he said he preferred not
to use that term. But he said business is clearly
showing a growing interest in technologies
that are not harmful to the environment. "Is
there a clear path?" he continued. "Absolutely
not. But we do have a broader dialogue going
on about what should be done."
He said there
is now almost universal acknowledgment that
global warming is a reality, "but
we have nothing approaching a consensus on
what should be done about it."
Still, he went
on, the discussions about that issue, and
about the thinning of the planet's
ozone layer as well, have become "less
contentious." All of these issues, he
said, "have a direct affect on people's
quality of life and standard of living--and
all of them relate to economics."
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