The use of Mark Potok on “60 Minutes” may have been a warning to Dobbs to tone down his anti-illegal immigration views.
By Cliff Kincaid
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which supported the “hate crimes” bill, is so extreme that it lists the conservative Christian Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), a coalition of churches, on a map of “hate groups” because of its opposition to special rights for homosexuals.
Sunday night’s “60 Minutes” on CBS featured a story about CNN’s Lou Dobbs that strangely included the comments of a monitor of “hate groups.” The implication was that there might be something hateful about Dobbs’ opposition to illegal immigration and open borders. Dobbs may not know it yet, but he is being set up as the next Don Imus.
While the story showed reporter Lesley Stahl exchanging pleasantries with Dobbs and interviewing him and his wife, the inclusion of Dobbs critic Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center was ominous. It is an indication that certain political views, mostly of a conservative nature, are being put into the same category as the Don Imus racist joke that got him fired from CBS Radio and MSNBC. The threat of political censorship in America has never been more real than it is today. And Dobbs isn’t the only target.
Potok, “who monitors hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center,” as Stahl put it, was presented as some kind of authority on what people can say¯and how they should say it¯on the air. It is shocking that a news broadcast like “60 Minutes” would play a role in an emerging campaign to criminalize and censor what other journalists say on the air. But liberals seem only to want free speech for themselves. Ironically, to her apparent dismay, Lesley Stahl reported at the end of the report that Dobbs had just been hired by CBS News as a television commentator for “The Early Show.” She said she didn’t know this when filming her piece on Dobbs. The use of Mark Potok on “60 Minutes” may have been a warning to Dobbs to tone down his anti-illegal immigration views.