Commentary
One if by Land, Two If by Air?
CNN’s Lou Dobbs spreads alarm about British companies to every Middle America village and farm.

By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
March 8, 2006

     Rather than a modern-day Paul Revere, Lou Dobbs sounded more like a black helicopter conspiracy theorist as he warned viewers of his March 7 program about the British “owning” American airports. But weeks earlier, the CNN anchor seemed to accept a private British company’ lease of six American port terminals as preferable to a lease from any “Middle Eastern” country.

     “President Bush has put forth a challenge tonight that I simply can't ignore,” the Harvard business alumnus thundered on his February 22 program, referring to the president’s question about why the Dubai-based company was held by its critics to a different standard on port maintenance than the British one already maintaining U.S. ports.

     “Well, first of all, Mr. President, to equate any country to your principal partner in the coalition ignores that special relationship this country's enjoyed with the United Kingdom for decades and decades,” argued Dobbs. The Harvard alumnus then added that the company presently running terminals at six U.S. seaports, “is a British privately owned company” while “Dubai Ports World is a UAE government-controlled and owned company. You see the difference, of course.”

     But on his March 7 program, Dobbs cited national security as a concern with British company BAA, which manages the facilities at Indianapolis International Airport. According to the company’s Web site, BAA was privatized in 1986 by act of Parliament, and a year later became a publicly traded company in the United Kingdom.

     Dobbs also misled viewers, ominously warning them in his introduction for Christine Romans’s March 7 report that foreign companies “are looking to buy up as much of this country as they possibly can.”

     In point of fact, while BAA has managed the Indianapolis airport since 1995, the state-chartered Indianapolis Airport Authority (IAA) “is responsible for owning, developing and operating” Indianapolis International Airport, according to the airport Web site.

     In addition to the BAA lease of the Indianapolis airport, reporter Christine Romans informed viewers that the “eight-mile long Chicago Skyway belongs to an Australian-Spanish consortium under a 99-year lease” and that the same company, Skyway Concession, LLC, plans to pay Indiana $4 billion “to control 157 miles of the Indiana toll road.”

     Implying that foreign contractors could impede national defense, Romans saw Ike’s interstates becoming the Queen’s highway. “It appears inevitable there will be foreign control of swaths of the interstate highway system, conceived by President Eisenhower to move our military from coast to coast,” Romans warned Dobbs.

     Following Romans’s story, Dobbs denounced critics who chalk up his fear that “in the time of war our airlines would not be available, the aircraft would not be available to move troops,” to his being “anti-Arab,” “racist” or xenophobic.

     Dobbs is none of those things. He is certainly patriotic – with a decidedly protectionist economic viewpoint. But Dobbs is also a journalist, not a tinfoil-hat wearing, black helicopter-conspiracy believing pundit. This isn’t about national security, it’s about politics and Dobbs knows it.

     Or he should.