Deep at the bottom of David Leonhardt's "Economix" column in the New York Times today comes some shocking news about Lou Dobbs, crusader against immigration and CNN's great white hope to capture a slice of the Bill O'Reilly yahoo demographic: He sometimes plays fast and loose with the facts. Let's boil it down—after all, there's little point in reading the actual column, as it's written upside-down and backwards.

  • Dobbs claimed that the massive influx of illegals into this country was responsible for a spike in the number of cases of leprosy on this side of the border. While a Dobbs correspondent noted that there have been 7000 cases in the last three years, that number is actually accurate for the last thirty years, with the peak coming back in 1983.
  • Dobbs claimed that illegal immigrants comprise one third of the population in the federal prison system. Actual number: 6 percent.
  • Dobbs gives airtime to white supremacists, one of whom once made the assertion that "Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children."
  • A Dobbs correspondent "referred to a Utah visit by Vicente Fox, then Mexico's president, as a 'Mexican military incursion.'"
  • All this causes Leonhardt to wonder:

  • [I]f Mr. Dobbs's arguments were really so good, don't you think he would be able to stick to the facts? And if CNN were serious about being "the most trusted name in news," as it claims to be, don't you think it would be big enough to issue an actual correction?

  • Good question. We're gonna go with, uh, ratings?
  • Truth, Fiction and Lou Dobbs [NYT]